Lemon debutante cake

{lemon curd}

I normally put recipes up here when I use them, because I normally have notes and tweaks and clarifications and I like to be able to look back at them.

{meringue}

I will not be posting Miette's recipe for the Lemon Debutante Cake here. I'm sorry. Mostly because it is so incredibly long and detailed that it would pain me to type it out and partly because the instructions are so exhaustive that I have nothing left to say. If you are looking to get a crash course in cake baking, the Miette cookbook is a great source. They walk you through it all step by step, which makes the recipes look intimidatingly long but is probably useful if you've never understood why you need to do a crumb coat.

{lemon debutante cake}

It was incredibly good. It took a lot of time. You will need an instant read thermometer. You MUST measure out all your ingredients in advance and have them ready and waiting. Please consider all those factors before diving in.

You have to make a curd and a simple syrup before you even get going on the cake. The cake itself requires you to use a double boiler to cook the eggs and you have to melt the butter into the milk and everything needs to be at the proper temperature before you start combining things. The buttercream uses the European method, so you need to beat hot sugar syrup into egg whites. My cake fell in the oven and wasn't terribly cooperative and I was cursing while I got it out of the pans and I swore I wouldn't recommend anyone else make it.

But the cake was so roundly enjoyed that I can't bring myself to steer you away from it. I will just recommend that you avoid starting it at the end of a 10 hour workday. Come to it fully rested and everything should go just fine. And maybe don't bother trying to split the layers, because it really wasn't necessary.