Fancy, yes? Easy, meh – not difficult, but there are five parts to it, so it is fiddly and fussy and takes forever.
Preheat your oven to 350F, and grease and lightly flour your Bundt pan.
Part one, make the cake: Mix 3 cups flour and two teaspoons baking powder, set aside. Using a mixer, combine 2 sticks softened unsalted butter, 2 cups granulated sugar, and 1 teaspoon salt, about 3 minutes until fluffy. Beat in 3 eggs, one at a time. Beat in 2 tablespoons lemon zest, ¼ cup lemon juice, and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Beat in half the flour mixture; beat in 1 cup whole milk; and beat in the other half of the flour mixture. Pour into the prepared Bundt pan and bake for 50 to 60 minutes, depending on how hot your oven is. You can test for doneness with a wooden skewer, it should come out mostly clean.
Part two, make the lemon glaze. While your cake is in the oven, microwave 1/2 cup granulated sugar and 1/4 cup lemon juice for about 60 seconds, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Set aside.
Part three, cool and stab your cake. Invert your cake on a plate after it has cooled a bit, maybe 15 minutes? This is where you will see if your pan preparation was successful. If it sticks, go along the sides with a knife. If it still sticks, wrap the pan in a hot wet towel for a few minutes – that should do it. Stab your cake all over the top and sides with a skewer. It deserves to be stabbed if was a bear to get out of the pan, anyway. Brush the lemon glaze all over the cake. If the glaze drips off, you need to cool the cake more (and maybe make more glaze). Go heavier on the top of the cake, so the glaze has a chance to seep into the stabbings. By filling the skewer holes with glaze you are guaranteed to have a moist, deeply flavorful cake. Cool the cake for another hour.
Part four, make the candied lemons. While the cake cools again, cut 2 or 3 lemons into 1/4-inch slices. You can remove the lemon pulp if just want candied peels. Bring 8 cups of water and the lemon slices to a boil, drain. Repeat this step 2 or 3 times to remove bitterness (fiddly, right?) This recipe for candied citrus works for any citrus fruit, so for sweeter citrus like oranges, one boiling is enough. Grapefruit will need 4 or 5 boils, and thus I refuse to use grapefruit. Combine 2 cups sugar with 2 cups water, boil until the sugar dissolves. Add the peels or thin slices, reduce the heat to low, and cook until the pith is clear-ish. Take the peels out, pat them dry, and toss them in some more sugar. You can store them in an airtight container. Save the cooking syrup and refrigerate – this is lemon simple syrup, and a tasty addition to cocktails or iced tea.
Part five, make the lemon icing. Beat together 2 cups powdered sugar, 3 tablespoons lemon juice (more if the icing is too thick). Pour the icing over the cake and let it drip down the sides. Grate the zest of one lemon over the top of the cake. Arrange some of your candied lemon or lemon peel for maximum presentation. Let the glaze dry and transfer (carefully) to a serving plate.
Should you make this? Are you bored and stuck in the house? Do you find cooking relaxing? Will you invite me over for some? Why yes, do make this cake! Otherwise, nah, it is just too much work for such an short-lived result (because it is tasty and will be scarfed right down.)
I can attest to the scarfing. On my end not hers.
Your foods always look so beautiful! I can never seem to make my cakes look pretty.
Thank you, Hannibal. Of course, I only show the ones that come out looking pretty. Some day ask Keitel to tell you the gory details about the slightly lop-sided tiered cake I made for my mother’s birthday…
This looks amazing. I will have to try this. I like baking but I’m not very good at it. It’s said that cooking is an art and baking is a science. When I bake I follow the recipes to the letter, and still half the time the results are inferior to what you’d find in the day-old section of the humblest supermarket. (Not to mention much more effort and expense.)
That said, I have a Bundt pan and I like that you assume we all do! I use mine to make a simple apple cake. That usually turns out pretty well. Twice I have made chocolate babka in a Bundt pan. Usually babka is made in a loaf pan or rolled out and you make a ring. Chocolate babka is incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive and making it in a Bundt pan somehow dials the difficulty up to 11. Did that deter me? Oh hell no. And my attempts came out really well but I read the recipe 100 times, made sure I had everything I needed, no substitutions, and made sure The Other Half would be out of the house. That’s the other thing about baking: no distractions. It’s one thing to have a few friends cluster in the kitchen when you cook something, especially something dull and time-consuming like a pasta sauce with a lot of passive time, but when it’s “two eggs room temperature added just when…” you must perform this in monastic silence. Or at least I do.
I have a difficult time believing you aren’t a wonderful baker. You’re a kitchen wizard!
I wouldn’t say that, but I learned for self-preservation. Plus, after I graduated from college I acquired this friend-of-a-friend as a roommate. I didn’t know how he felt about me but I knew how I felt about him. We were absolutely broke so I made him a deal. If he would split the cost of the groceries I would cook, because I cooked for myself in college. Had POWs been served the slop my college cafeteria served they would have been defying the Geneva Convention. That way we could have restaurant-ish meals that we could afford. Also, he had to do the dishes, because we had no dishwasher and the kitchen sink was like the size of a paperback.
So I bought a second-hand copy of a Marcella Hazan cookbook and started cooking from that. Neither of us has any familial relationship to Italy, by the way. After a couple of months of this, maybe a little more, we drunkenly…well, anyway, we just celebrated our 34th anniversary as a couple in August. This sounds incredibly retro but believe me, knowing the rudiments of cooking will get a person far in life. There is nothing romantic about dialing up DoorDash or whatever.
That is such a sweet story.
Oh my…I actually have two Bundt pans…a rounded one and a geometric one. The geometric is a nightmare to use, no matter how much time is spent in pan prep. I think Bundt pans may be things one’s kitchen acquires as the cook ages?
This would make a great Sociology PhD research thesis: “The Correlation of North American Bundt Pan Acquisition and Age in the 21st Century.”