- Today I'll be showing you
how to make this delicious and might I say pretty
Lemon Elderflower Cake. Can you guess why I was
inspired to make it? Okay, let's get started. Starting off this delicious
lemon elderflower cake by sifting all the dry
ingredients together in the bowl of my standing mixer. 2 1/4 cups of cake flour, one heaping teaspoon of baking powder, a teaspoon of kosher salt. Don't forget that quarter and
a cup of granulated sugar. If you wanna reduce the sugar in this feel free you could probably take it down to 2/3 of a cup and be fine. In fact, you could also decrease the sugar and increase the elderflower syrup as that is quite sweet. Sift those together. You can really see how
fine that cake flour is, as it's flying all over the place. I always get questions about
substitutions from people and let me tell you you
could use all purpose flour it will be okay, everyone we'll live and if you can't find sour cream, use yogurt instead that's totally fine. Just use whole milk
plain and you'll be fine. Add it on to our standing
mixer and satisfied. Away you. Okay, now for the wet ingredients. People always ask me what do
you do with the egg yolks? The answer is anything you want, but today we're gonna make
a lemon curd with them and that curd is gonna be
in the filling of the cake. Delicious, fresh, perfect for summer. Make sure those eggs
are at room temperature. Don't use cold eggs people. Egg whites in one bowl,
egg yolks in the other. If you get a little piece
of yolk in the bowl, it's totally fine, don't worry about it. Clean hands is always
the best way to separate egg yolks and egg whites
in case you're wondering. And tell how fresh eggs are because the whites are more gelatinous and they hold together better. These eggs are fresh. Later on we'll be
straining these egg yolks just to get rid of the little membrane and using them for our curd . It's gonna be delicious. If you're wondering you
can totally make the cake a day ahead make the
lemon curd a day ahead and have it set perfectly in the fridge and then decorate the cake all at once. Even the Swiss meringue buttercream can be made ahead of time. Set those yolks aside now
we're gonna add in our milk. One quarter cup of room
temperature sour cream. Adding in two tablespoons
of my elderflower syrup, heaping tablespoons. It smells delicious. If you can't get your hot little hands on some elderflower syrup, mine came from Amazon. I don't know which supermarkets carry it. You could go ahead and
use some Saint Germain also made out of elderflowers and then create a simple syrup with that. I would cook it down a
bit for some less alcohol unless you play that way. And then just add that either
into the cake ingredients or spoon it over the top of
the already baked lemon cake. And just skip this. I'm adding in the zest of
one lemon into my mixture. Juicing my lemons, I want
about a third of a cup. Never use pre-made lemon juice that is not acceptable
and it'll ruin your cake unlike anything else. Let's measure this out and add
it into our wet ingredients. Perfect, now give it a whisk. Just gonna add a little dash in. Set that aside and now it's time to cream our butter along
with the dry ingredients. When you add your butter
into the dry ingredients, also known as the reverse creaming method, you're coding all of that
flour in delicious fat, which is inhibiting the
gluten and creating a more kicky, fluffy delicious cake, less bready. 3/4 of a cup of room temperature unsalted butter into that mix. I'm gonna add a few dobs mix on low. (roaring sound)
Continue adding. Okay, let's take a look, I wanna show you the crump. So ending up with a beautiful
crummy mixture like this. It's gonna be amazing once
we add our wet mixture in. I'm going to prepare
my three six inch pans by buttering and flowering them Just get some cold butter,
rub it along the edges, add some flour, kick around. Transfer the flour to the next pan. That looks perfect. And continue kicking it around. I'm adding on my cake strips now if you wanna see how to make
your own or how these work go ahead and click up over here somewhere for my "How to get flat
cake layers" video. Alright, now that my pans are prepared, it's time to finish off that cake butter. I'm adding half of the liquid
and then beating it together for maybe a minute and a half and then adding the rest in
and beating for another minute. On low.
(roaring sound) Now there's the cake butter. Let's get the ball down. Mix for a minute. (roaring) Transfer the batter and after I do that I'll show you how to measure and make sure you have pretty exact layers if you don't have a kitchen scale at home. If you don't have a kitchen scale, go ahead and use a skewer and kind of like checking
the oil in a car. Just check the depth. Those are pretty much about right into the oven at 350
for probably 35 minutes, we'll see exactly in the titles below. While the cake's in the oven we're gonna make our lemon
curd using those six egg yolks. So the first step is to
strain them into a medium pot. And cutting up a stick of
butter or one half of a cup that's chilled it has to
cold, into small cubes. We'll be whisking this
into the curd at the end after it's reached that
magical 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Now I need a third of a cup of lemon juice fresh again, so two medium
size lemons should be enough but we'll see. Measure about a third of a cup. I'm using a French whisk for this and if you didn't know a
French whisk is just narrower so it can really hit
the corners of the pot and you won't get any bad parts. Very useful. And now start adding a
cup of granulated sugar. See it turning a beautiful
light lemon color. I really love this, it's so cheerful. So today we're making a lemon curd but you don't have to restrict
yourself to that one fruit. You can make an orange
curd, a strawberry curd, raspberry blackberry, blueberry, basically anything you want. Using this same method. Third have a cup of the juice
along with the six egg yolks and one cup of sugar, really simple. All right, we're gonna
add our lemon juice in and then give it a whisk. Drizzling that lemon juice. We're just gonna curd over low heat until it reaches 170 degrees. Make sure you keep whisking
because if you don't, you'll have a bad yoke part on the bottom and nobody wants that. Once it hits 170 you'll
notice a change in consistency and you can dip a wooden spoon in, see if it holds the curd run your finger down it and you should see that
finger mark left intact. Now it's time to add in your
half cup of cube chilled butter into that beautiful yellow curd, whisk it in and we can
transfer it to cool. My lemon curd is all done. Look at this amazingness, I
love that color it's beautiful. It does however need to sit
in the fridge for a while. So let's pour that into a
bowl and leave it to chill. That is like a little bit of
sunshine, it is delicious. We're gonna cover this up and refrigerate. So it's time to show you how you can tell when your cake is done. If you look closely, you can see it's pulling away from the pan and of course might stick a
skewer and it comes out clean. And if I touch it , it
has a little spring to it. Now it's done. We leave it in the pan too
cool for like four minutes and then we can invert it onto a wire rack to cool completely. They cool down for four minutes and now we're gonna
invert onto our wire rack. Look at these flat beautiful layers. It smells so good. I wish I could try it out but we're going to cool down while we work on our buttercream. To make our elderflowers
Swiss meringue buttercream, we're gonnna start off by separating our egg whites and egg yolks make sure your eggs are room temperature. I have mine sitting in a warm water bath because they're straight out of the fridge and I needed to make them
room temperature real quick. Normally I say it
doesn't matter if you get a little bit of yolks in
your whites in the batter. This time it does matter
a lot, so be very careful and add in a pinch of salt and one and a half cups
of granulated sugar. Give this a good whisk. If you feel this right now
you're gonna see, so grainy, you can feel every little piece of sugar. When we're done with this, it's been whisked over the bain-marie you'll find out that it's gonna
be smooth, warm and perfect. You can use a thermometer but using your fingers
is a pretty good gesture. We're gonna do all this whisking on top of a pot of simmering water because we wanna gently heat our eggs, not heat them so that they turn into a nasty egg white omelet situation. Just make sure you're gonna
whisk whisk whisk over the heat. Of course the bowl should
not touch the water. It's the steam that's gently heating it. If you have a little helper, this is a perfect time for
them to come and assist. You'll notice that it becomes much wider and more kind of like a fin merengue. By the time we're done with this. We're whisking this until
it gets to 160 by the way, right now it's at 100
degrees, so few minutes more. Alright, so we just hit 160. Thank you thermometer. And if I feel with my hands, it's hot. Well, it's warm, hot and
it's super gooey and smooth. Perfect. Now we're gonna transfer
it to our standing mixer with a whisk attachment and whip it up. Whip it up until it is a
beautiful silky merengue that's room temperature, just
like Italian butter cream you can't put the butter in until the meringue is at room temperature. I'm putting my hot egg white mixture in and I'm gonna use a spatula just to make sure I get it all out. Don't waste it. We're starting off with this the thick, delicious gooey
and we're gonna end up with a silky beautiful meringue. I also want to point out you
should definitely make sure that your bowl and
whisk are totally clean. Any doubts just rub a lemon on them a cut lemon of course,
and then wipe it down or even use some vinegar just to make sure there's no fat(mumble) We're gonna mix this
on medium, medium high until it's nice and whipped up. You're gonna see that
after just a few minutes, your merengue is gonna be
silky beautiful and strong. However, it's still a bit too warm you feel with your finger needs to be totally room
temperature not warm . If it's warm your butter will melt and it'll become kind of a bit of a mess, not the end of the world that
just means that you'll have to keep whipping it up until the butter solidifies up and you get
the right consistency. Or if it's really warm, I often just pop it into the freezer and leave it there for
five minutes to chill out, and then give it a whip and it's fine. I mean, I say often but that
only happens to me every once in a while and I'm
running a little bit too fast. If you're in a hurry, by the way, you can totally pack your bowl
with some like frozen peas or ice packs and it chills
it down really quick. Close that back up. We're gonna whip on low until
we reach room temperature and just don't hurry it. Take some time. Go look some flowers. Everything's at room temperature and we're gonna add our butter in. Instead of cutting mine into cubes, I'm just going to take little slices off and kind of toss them in there. Works fine. Right here in one and
three quarters of a cup unsalted butter at room temperature. Mind you room temperature, not
cool, not a little bit hard but not runny either. Just tossing handfuls of
butter into this ball, don't worry about it. It's a cake. So taking a look right now you can see the consistency
starting to change. It's not soupy, but it's not
as kind of firm as you want. So make sure you scrape the bowl down. Close that back up and continue to whip. While we whip though I'm gonna add in a tablespoon
of my elderflower syrup. I might add a little bit
more, but I wouldn't add less. (roaring) Definitely gonna add a
second tablespoon in it. I'm adding a third tablespoon in it. What can I say? I always recommend giving a
final whip to your butter cream before you apply it. Especially for a meringue
based buttercream they really lose
consistency kind of quickly. So right before you put in
a piping bag or smear it on, just give it a final whip. You could even just use
your spatula and whip it up or put a paddle attachment on it. We're going to set this aside and now it's time for
some roses and flowers. To decorate this cake, you could totally top it
with a beautiful peonies which are in season now. Some roses, whatever flowers you'd like beautiful, easy and has a
nice rustic quality to it. However, I am gonna do
some buttercream flowers because I like everything
on a cake to be edible. I don't people have to pick
things off but that's just me. To do that, I could use
Swiss meringue buttercream but I'm gonna be honest
with you and tell you that those flowers can
get really droopy fast especially in warmer weather. Because while meringue butter cream is silky and amazing and sent from heaven, it doesn't do well in heat and it's just not a
really stiff buttercream. So we're gonna make a small
batch of American buttercream which is much sweeter, but great for those decorative elements. If you wanted a heat proof, beautiful substance to make flowers with, go ahead and whip up some of that Korean white bean paste frosting. I've tried it. It was pretty time intensive but there's other ways to do it too. And it tastes like beans but it's perfect visually while making American buttercream. So once a quarter of a
cup of room temperature unsalted butter into our mixing bowl fitted with a paddle attachment. Cream the butter for a few
minutes on like medium low. (roaring) My butter is all creamy. We're gonna remove the paddle attachment. Now we're gonna sift our sugar. You always sift sugar when you're piping anything delicate like a flower because any lump in here
will stick in the small, thin parts of your piping
tip and ruin everything. You can't use the
buttercream if that happens, you'll have to use it for a crammer code or some non-decorative situation. Very important. I'm adding in about a
pound, pound and a half. This has to be a very thick buttercream for my style of rose. So it'd be sweet but we're
not eating a lot of it. It's just a couple of flowers. It's always a good idea to add your sugar in a couple batches so that it's more manageable in the mixer. Sift it out or mix on low. Okay, look at this situation, having added half the sugar
and you can see this is really buttery and delicious. But so weak add some more sugar in. When I'm making butter cream for flowers, my first and foremost
concern is consistency. So add more or less sugar in
to get the right consistency Tea towel back on and mix again. Okay, don't let go the tea towel that's important. Glad that was on or it
could have made a mess. Hold it. Alright, so I want you to see that now buttercream is a very
different consistency. It looks kinda crazy, but
when you smooth it out, you can see it's totally
smooth, nice and dense. So this point you can
add in your flavoring I'm adding in a teaspoon of rose water because I think it's nice
for the roses to smell and tastes like roses. (roaring) Your butter cream is now ready
to separate into batches, add coloring to and pipe. Now taking a larger batch of butter cream and we're gonna mix in some
soft pink food coloring. Soft pink is the only pink that I use when I'm making roses because
it's so much more realistic. That hot supermarket bakery
pink that you can get out of normal sets, is just too much . Even if you use a little
bit, still too much. When you're making realistic flowers, it always helps to have a gradient so you fill one half of the
piping bag with one shade the other half with another
shade or even a white and then when you pipe it out, it gives it more depth and realism. The rest of it will leave white for now we will be piping some
white flowers as well and we're gonna color a little bit of it with some muncher powder for our leaves. I'm gonna try doing a classic rose with a 127 tip for my first flower. Smear the butter cream
onto your work surface. Pat on your square of parchment paper and let's get started. Taking some of my thick butter cream better place it on there and
make a little mound out of it using my 127 tip and I'm gonna make a little
spiral to start off with. Once your spiral is complete, you can start making little
arcs that'll overlap. There we go. That's a perfectly nice
flower and when we finish, we'll be using our scissors
to cut the flower off and place it onto the
cake and we'll do a spiral a little bit looser this time. If your rose looks a little bit wonky, feel free to take off one of the petals or use a toothpick to kind of
manipulate it as you see fit. It doesn't have to be perfect
right out of the piping tip. You can totally move it around here there. Okay, now it's time to decorate that cake. We're gonna start off with
a ring of butter cream on the first layer but make
your ring thicker than I did 'cause this was a problem. Also put a lot of butter
cream in the center then add your lemon curd. Okay, now you can add your second layer on just stirring up the butter cream, fill it up with the curd and add your final layer on top of that. You might wanna pop this into
the fridge now at this point if it becomes unstable. Now cover the cake completely
with your beautiful and delicious elderflowers
Swiss meringue buttercream. Use a bent scraper to smooth the side and an opposite spatula to smooth the top. So to finish the smoothing,
you're gonna work on your edge by using an offset spatula
to bring in the edge on top. As you turn the cake. Do that a couple of
times don't overwork it. And then pop it into the
fridge to chill for a while. You're gonna add a little
cresent of butter cream on top. Just for flowers can adhere to that and also be lifted up a bit because we always love
a little bit of height. Place the flowers onto your
crescent of buttercream add a couple in the front or
on the back if you want to. Now use a 68 tip to pipe some leaves and give a little bit of visual interest. It's kind of optional because I actually loved
the way this cake looked with just the white butter cream and the very very pale pink flowers. But I think the leaves
gave you a little bit of definition and interest. Okay, I'll admit I was a
little skeptical at first about the whole lemon
elderflower situation. Clearly I just made it
because of the royal wedding, but I'm so glad I did
because it's delicious. Elderflower is like slightly citrusy, very floral, delicate lemon. Clearly, you know that tastes like. Together they're a match made in heaven. I'll be eating this and
that and that and that. If you have any questions? Leave them in the comments below. Thanks for watching. Make this recipe. Hit the like button and
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