For Ray’s birthday I decided I would bake a homemade cake. Ray’s favorite is lemon cake with lemon icing. The homemade part was my attempt at making up for having missed his actual birthday and celebrating a week later (I was away visiting my family in Puerto Rico). Now a homemade cake may not seem good enough to make up for not actually being here, but if you had ever seen me attempting to make any food item, you would understand why baking from scratch really was a huge deal. Luckily, my very ungifted hands found a super easy  recipe online. I made this no problem so I promise you can too. I found the recipe on About.com.

What you will need:
4 eggs
1/2 cup milk
2 cups flour
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
zest from 1 or 2 lemons
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Prep Work: Preheat your oven to 350° F. Butter up and flour a cake pan (The site says bunt pan, because the recipe was for a bunt cake – but I just used a circular pan and it was fine).

Step 1.  Zest and juice your lemon. I had the thing you need to zest a lemon. If you don’t, then don’t include the zest and put more lemon juice. Though the zest does make a difference, but you will be fine without it.

Step 2.  Beat the eggs and sugar until thick. I used an electric mixer because no way were my hands going to withstand using the whisk. Slowly beat in the oil. Add the flour, baking powder, salt, and milk. Keep beating the mixture until it looks smooth (not clumpy). Once it’s all well mixed up, add the lemon juice, zest and vanilla.

Step 3.  Mix in my two special ingredients at the end – A little extra vanilla and some Bacardi rum.

Step 4.  Pour the batter into the pan you buttered up and floured previously. Bake for about 40 minutes or until the cake is done. I like to set my timer to 35 minutes and start checking through the oven door from there, every 5 minutes – but don’t open the oven door! I open it all the time and my cakes always fall slightly.

Step 5.  While the cake bakes, you can make the frosting.  You can always just use vanilla frosting since the cake is lemony anyways. Ray really loves the lemon flavor though so I used my dad’s homemade frosting recipe. If you are going with store bought, skip to Step 7. Now I should mention, I first tried a lemon icing recipe I found on Martha Stewarts’s website. That turned out badly. Thankfully my dad is kind of really amazing at making frosting and helped me start over with his recipe.

For the my dad’s frosting: mix 4 egg whites with one cup of confectioner’s sugar (I put regular sugar in the blender and blended it until it looks like baby powder). Add in any leftover lemon juice ( I just gave my lemon a good two squeezes right into the bowl) and add a teaspoon’s worth of lemon zest (or whatever you have leftover). I also throw in another bit of rum, it helps prevent the frosting from tasting too eggy. It should look like this when you are done:

 Step 6.  Check your cake and if it’s done, take it out and allow the cake to cool and then remove it from the pan. I usually just set it on a serving platter. Now my cakes never come out looking beautiful or perfect, but I don’t worry about that because the frosting covers it all up anyway.

Here is my cake, frosted and partially eaten – I forgot to take pictures once it was out of the oven because Ray called that he was coming home early so sh*t got hectic.

Sidenote: My dad likes to make extra frosting and using it as an easy to do filling for two layer cakes.

Let me know how your lemon cake turn out!

Have fun baking : )