My friend Barb Eastman, up in LaPort, IN made this beautiful wedding cake at home! It called for 72 eggs and 9 lbs of butter and it is filled with lemon curd and raspberries. You rock, Babs!
Here are Barb’s notes on the cake:
“The recipe came from Epicurous.com. It’s by Melissa Murphy of Sweet Melissa Patisseries in Brooklyn. It was published in Gourmet in April, 2007. There is a video you can watch on the website. (When you get to the Epicurious site they just put in wedding cake in the “search recipes” – it’s called Lemon Raspberry wedding cake. OR there is a link below at the end of this blog)
I used about 7 half pints of raspberries (at 4.99 each!), and juiced about 20 lemons. The cake serves 125 and it was delicious. The meringue buttercream was fabulous! Much softer than the icky, greasy Wilton-type frosting that they use in grocery stores and lots of bakery cakes. The butter cream was too soft to make flowers, so the roses are real.
It gave me a healthy respect for cake professionals who charge hundreds of dollars for cakes like these. In addition to the cost of the ingredients (as I mentioned, 72 eggs (mostly just the whites, except for the 18 that went into the lemon curd)), and just under 9 pounds of butter, this took days to make. I just have a standard Kitchen Aid stand mixer. I made the cake batter recipe 3 times (as suggested in the recipe), and the frosting had to be made in three batches, also.
The most daunting part was moving the cake. I live on a hill. It is about a 30-35 degree incline (or should I say DEcline, as we had to take it downhill! My brother, Chas, and I took the back seat out of the van and he sat in the back, on the floor, holding onto the cake for dear life.
I started the cake on Monday and froze the layers as I made them. They were almost completely thawed when we split the layers, but having them just under-thawed made them easier to split. We crumb-coated and filled the cakes the day before and did the final frosting and decorating on the day of the party.
It was a great achievement and many said it was the most delicious wedding cake any of them had ever had. Thank you Melissa Murphy!!”
