Welcome to AJ Zorvella Bakes. We’re making a zingy flavorful lemon blueberry cake, so let’s get started. First off set your OV to 350. This batter comes together really quickly. Now in a large bowl we’re going to add our dry ingredients starting with 2 cups or 240 G of all-purpose flour. If you don’t have a scale make sure you’re fluffing your flour and sprinkling it into your measuring cup. If you scoop you’ll use too much.
I also want 1 and 2/3 cups of granulated sugar that’s 333 G. The sugar sweetens the cake but it also gives it a really really tender melt in your mouth consistency. For contrast I’m adding 1/4 teaspoon of kosher salt and to Puff things up 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder. By the way if you like delicious things make sure you subscribe to the blog. There’s two new recipes every single week, lots of tips and always something tasty along the way. My scale is done I’m going to grab a whisk. If you don’t we’re going to give this a whisk and get everything nicely distributed. Reserve 1 tablespoon of your dry mixture and set this aside.
Now it’s time to grab a big bowl and a hand mixer or a stand mixer with a paddle attachment. Into the bowl of my stand mixer, I’m adding 3/4 of a cup or 170 G of very nice softened butter. It’s room temperature, but room temperature on a warm day can see my finger goes right in the butter bends nicely. This means it’s in a cream perfectly. That’s one and 1/2 sticks. When I just started writing recipes for this blog, I would just say one and a half sticks of butter or two sticks of butter, not realizing that the sticks of butter are different sizes in different countries. Now we have cups and grams, so we’re always going to be sure. I’m going to cream this up on medium for just a few seconds.
Okay, that looks really nice, and now we’re going to do something special. I’m adding the dry ingredients, including the sugar, right into the butter, and we’re going to mix this up on medium low until it’s nice and crumbly. So this is called the reverse creaming method and it is so nice because it makes your cake basically foolproof. We’re coating all the flour in fat from the butter and that protects it from activating and becoming gummy, gluey and overmixed. Basically the gluten in the flour won’t activate when it hits the wet stuff and you don’t have to worry about overmixing your cake. It’s very nice, gives you a really, really tender melt-in-your-mouth crumb.
I’m scraping my paddle down as well as the bowl just to make sure that there’s no solid butter hanging around. I want everything nicely mixed. You’re going to end up with something like a wet Sandy mixture. For regular cake batter you’d be creaming the butter adding the sugar, fluffing it up then adding the flour, alternating with the wet and dry ingredients. This is just simpler and you can’t get it wrong. Just make sure that there are no big chunks of butter hanging out and then we’re on to the next step.
Now, I increase the speed to medium for a few seconds and when you take a look into the bowl, you can see it’s beautifully crumbly. They’re all small pieces. It’s like beautiful sand from the most perfect beach ever.
Now, in a medium Bowl, I’m going to combine all the wet ingredients, starting with a 1/2 cup or 120 MLS of sour cream. This gives you so much flavor and it kind of grounds the cake. It gives it some substance without making it dense and you have a little bit of a Tang to contrast with the sweetness. We’re also adding in half a cup of whole milk and if you’re wondering where the lemon flavor comes from, it really comes from the lemon zest we’re going to add. You want about a tablespoon, which is two lemons’ worth. I’m using a microplane or rasp just to get the yellow part off of the skin. That’s where the oil is. The pith is kind of bitter and does not have that lemon flavor we love. Tap that in, cut your lemon and we want 3 teaspoons of juice. You don’t need that much because we already have a lot of liquid in this recipe. Measure out 3 tablespoons; save the rest of your lemon juice for your frosting.
For some structure, I’m adding three egg whites. If you’re wondering why we’re not using the yolks, it’s really for the color. I want to have this kind of cold white color for the cake so the yolks can’t go in. Okay, if a little yolk goes in, don’t worry about it, that’s totally fine. I’m going to add in a tablespoon of vanilla.
Now we’re going to whisk this up till it’s nice and smooth. Right now you’re just breaking up the egg whites and the sour cream. The rest mixes very well.
Before everything comes together, we have one more thing to do and that’s to combine our tablespoon of reserved dry mixture with our blueberries. Just give that little toss. The flour, in theory, traps a little bit of air around the blueberries and helps them to float in your batter and not just sink to the bottom.
With my mixer running on low, I’m going to drizzle in this wet mixture. Once everything’s nice and combined, get rid of that paddle. I like to keep a special eye out for any zest that’s clinging here because the zest has so much flavor in it.
I’m going to dump my blueberries in and fold them in gently. Just fold those in. Be gentle with your berries. Give the bowl a scrape just to make sure that nothing’s lingering at the bottom and this is ready to go into our pans right now.
I’m going to grab three 6-inch pans, although you could make this into 8-inch pans. It’s totally up to you. Butter and flour them, so just prep the edge and add a parchment round. This is your insurance policy that nothing will stick in the pan.
If you’re never worried about that sort of thing, you can just butter and flour the pans. Distribute the batter evenly into your pans. What I’m trying to do is distribute the blueberries evenly into the pans. If you want, you can eyeball it, but I like to use a scale just to make sure everything is exactly the same.
An equal amount of batter in each pan means that the cakes will bake up together evenly. If one has a lot less batter, it’ll be done first and overbake if you take them all at the same time.
This is optional, but I’m using baking strips today. These are just wet fabric strips that you wrap around your pans and it insulates them so they bake up really flat. There’s no doming and the edge of the pan has a cake that’s nice and soft. If you prefer to have a cake that is kind of like crisp and caramelized on the outside, just don’t do this. Using cake strips also means that you won’t have any snacking cake when you trim the tops off.
The cake is cooling and they look so puffy and beautiful. I can’t wait to pop these out but first you have to make the buttercream. So grab 1 and 1/2 cups or 340 G, of softened unsalted butter. This is room temperature but think about it as room temperature on a warm day. Just like with the cake I can press it in very easily and it’s going to cream up beautifully.
Cream it up for just a few seconds. I want about 3 tablespoons of lemon juice, so now would be a good time to squeeze a lemon. Once your butter’s creamed we’re going to add six cups of powdered sugar. Add your sugar in a few batches, maybe two cups at a time. Mix on low and drizzle some lemon juice in as you go.
For contrast, I’m also adding in 1/4 teaspoon of kosher salt. Here we go, just a little bit and the last batch of powdered sugar. Because this is American buttercream you can really do the powdered sugar to taste. If you want to stop at 5 cups, that’s totally fine. If you wanted to add a little bit more, you could do that too. The only thing that’ll change besides the taste is the consistency of the buttercream. The sugar helps give it some structure, so with less sugar, it’ll be a bit more slack and you might have some drooping in your layer cake.
I’m adding in the remaining tablespoon of lemon juice and it’s a good time to scrape the bowl down. I’m going to mix this on high for just 1 minute to really fluff things up and make sure it’s all mixed well. Then we’re going to divide our mixture and flavor some of it with blueberries.
Just a little mixi,ng later and my buttercream is like blindingly white compared to what it was before. It’s basically glowing. In the medium bowl I’m going to transfer about 3/4 of a cup of my buttercream and flavor it with my blueberry reduction.
We didn’t forget about that and it’s going to give us so much flavor and beautiful color. I’m going to add my blueberry reduction to my reserved buttercream about a tablespoon at a time and mix it in until I have the desired color, flavor and consistency. It’s totally up to you and if you have any leftover you can drizzle that between the layers or you can make the whole batch of buttercream lemon blueberry flavored. It’s really up to you and how you want to decorate the cake at this point.
Look at this color. That is stunning. Oh my gosh. The taste is, excellent too. Mmm. It’s so nice. It’s time to assemble our cake. I let my cakes cool in the pan which was fine because I had that parchment paper. So pretty.
Okay, snip the tips off your piping bags if you’re using them. I’m going to do blueberry buttercream in the middle and lemon buttercream on the outside.
The second layer is the same as the first. Blueberry buttercream in the middle and lemon buttercream on the outside. Pop that last layer on top.
You could completely coat this in buttercream. The recipe makes enough buttercream for this 6-inch cake totally coated and decorated with dollops and frills, or an 8-inch two-layer cake also totally coated.
I’m going to do this with a nice coating on top, some dollops and then I’m going to leave it almost naked on the sides so all these beautiful blueberries come through. It’s one of my favorite parts of the cake.
I have my remaining buttercream in this piping bag. I gave it a really quick whip on high just to restore it because buttercream will settle and become kind of foamy if you leave it for a few minutes. So I want this to be silky smooth which means it needs a quick whip.
I’m adding some to the top and some to the sides but I’m not going to go crazy. I popped my cake onto a turntable. If you don’t have one you can grab the turntable from your microwave and apparently that works too, or just do it on the countertop.
Smooth the top and smooth the side as well. I’m actually going to do basically a crumb coat on this so all those blueberries shine through.
If your cake’s crooked you can just straighten it up and pop it into the fridge if it’s really bad, or just keep going. You could also pop a skewer through the middle to hold it in place.
Pull the top in for a nice corner finish. Finish your cake with a ring of dollops along the top. Chill your cake so the frosting can set. Then just before serving top with your frozen blueberries.
Give it a slice and you’re ready to enjoy.
That cake is packed with blueberry and lemon flavor and it just melts in your mouth. Amazing. I hope you had a chance to make this recipe.
