Tartine Lemon Meringue Cake

Tartine is the best bakery/cafe in the Mission District of San Francisco. The Lemon Meringue Cake is one of their most popular. Here is my attempt using the Tartine Cookbook (page 81)

I made a 9" cake as well as this Mini-Me 4" cake

Layers of lemon chiffon, lemon syrup, caramel and lemon cream...topped with meringue

Remember my friend Sumi flying down from San Francisco carrying her purse and a delicious Tartine Lemon Meringue Cake? I tried to make this absolutely beautiful and yummy cake this weekend!

Like the Caramel Cook, this is an all-day cake! His turned out much better than mine, but I'm calling this Lemon Meringue Cake, Draft #1.

There are four major components: Lemon Cream, Caramel, Lemon Chiffon Cake, and Meringue...and a quick and easy Lemon Syrup.

Luckily, UCLA Men's Basketball played Washington State (and beat the 4th ranked team!!) on Saturday and there were a zillion NFL playoff games this weekend that I watched while baking. :)

Caramel: Water, sugar, corn syrup boiled until light amber. Warmed heavy cream is added and then butter is whisked in. I burnt the first batch (of course!) but the second one came out okay!

Lemon Chiffon Cake: I whisked together the yolks, flour, sugar, water, lemon juice, zest and oil in one bowl. Then a bunch of egg whites are whipped up and added to the wet batter. But then I realized I had WAY too many eggs to fit in my bowl! Quick switch to the monster Tupperware green (circa 1970) bowl. (Damn, I love Tupperware!) I used a 9" springform from Surfas and two small 4 x 2 pans (also from Surfas). The recipe called for a 10" springform, but I didn't have one.

Completed lemon chiffon cake - right out of the oven...then it fell. I leveled off the top and tried to figure out how to cut 4 layers out of the now shorter cake. Next time, I think I'll make it only 3 layers. You need to wrap the pan in plastic wrap so anything lemon doesn't touch the aluminum pan - that creates a bad taste, per the Tartine cookbook.

Assembling the cake: Lemon chiffon cake, brush on lemon syrup, caramel layer, lemon cream...and repeat. The cake needs to chill out overnight. Here is my mini-me cake.

Then, you create the meringue frosting and frost the cake. Although the cookbook says to heat the whites and sugar over a double boiler til 120 degrees, I went to 160 because I'm crazy about egg safety and Martha Stewart goes that high. My meringue was tasty, but I think I overwhipped the frosting and didn't get those great swoops I wanted.

The Torching.
Dude, I so love this!
More things should involve torching.

The lovely propane torch was fired up this morning...and after you torch it (takes only a few milliseconds to get a nice brown color on the meringue) you get this cool looking cake!

Seriously, the best part?

The whole entire house smells like toasted marshmallows at 6:00 am.

This was only batch #1 of a zillion...with cake, meringue, lemon cream, and two batches of caramel...it was a crazy dish washing experience!