Tartine Lemon Meringue Cake

In case you needed another reason to buy the Tartine cookbook, here's some pictures of their Lemon Meringue Cake that I made this week. It's layers of lemon chiffon cake filled with simple lemon syrup, vanilla caramel, and lemon custard, frosted with thick meringue and torched to a golden brown.

It came out very well; the cake is delicious. It's so time-intensive, though, that I'm not about to make it again soon. I made the caramel, lemon syrup, and lemon custard on the first night, made and filled the cake on the second, and then made the meringue, frosted the cake, and torched it and served it on the on the third.

No recipe with this one: The scones were a relatively short, self-contained endeavor, but this one relies on several of Tartine's basic preparations and is very detailed; reprinting it all here would be like giving half the book away.

Preparing the caramel

Cooking the lemon custard over a double-boiler

Making the cake batter: gently folding in the egg white foam

The finished cake

Filling the cake layers

Delicious thick meringue

Frosted cake

The torched, finished cake

This cake is fun to make because it's an opportunity to practice a bunch of different techniques using well-written, detailed recipes --the caramel doesn't even use a thermometer. The lemon custard is wonderfully simple and essential. The cake recipe is good enough that, surprisingly, it came out perfectly on my first attempt. As an added treat, you get to make two separate egg white foams in this one -- the one folded into the cake batter is plain, simple, room temperature egg whites whipped up. The frosting is egg whites, first whisked with sugar and heated over a double-boiler and then whipped up into a foam. It's a good opportunity to see the difference: in the frosting, adding the sugar right at the start prevents the foam from rising as high, and heating it up before whipping makes the texture velvety and extremely smooth.

Furthermore, while it's time-consuming overall, each component of the cake is relatively simple, and everything but the meringue frosting can be prepared days in advance.

It came out well. It's surprisingly heavy, given that it's an egg-heavy but dairy-light cake, and so much of it is whipped. I was expecting it to be a bit lighter. I guess when you soak that fluffy cake in chilled sugar syrup, caramel, and lemon custard, it gets a little bit more... solid.

So cut those slices thin.