This chiffon cake has a strong lemon flavor, and can be enjoyed on its own, with a light dusting of powdered sugar, or not-too-sweet icing of your choice!
Happy New Year!
One of my goals of the new year is to cook/bake through my large cookbook collection. This recipe is from one of my culinary text books, scaled down to be home baker friendly.
Ever since I made a chiffon cake for Thanksgiving, I have been wanting a reason to bake another chiffon cake. But instead of making that cake again, I dove into my books to find something else to bake. And because they are in season (and I have a big bag of it), I wanted to use Meyer lemon in the recipe.
Chiffon cakes are a type of foam cake, which uses whipped eggs as the main source of its structure. The yolks are mixed with the liquid, part of the sugar, and oil; followed by the dry ingredients to create a thick (if not paste-like) batter. The whites are whipped with the remaining sugar and gently folded into the yolks.
If you have been wary of baking cakes that require folding in whipped egg whites, chiffon cakes are a great way to start. The added baking powder can help give the batter a lift if you folded just a bit too much (not that it will completely fix over mixing!) If you want to use another citrus, you can sub it in for the lemon in equal proportion.
Meyer Lemon Chiffon Cake
Course: Dessert8
servings20
minutes50
minutes300
kcalThis chiffon cake has a strong lemon flavor, and can be enjoyed on its own, with a light dusting of powdered sugar, or not-too-sweet icing of your choice!
Ingredients
Cake Flour 181 g
Baking Powder 8 g
Salt 3 g
Granulated Sugar 156 g 51 g
Egg Yolk 114 g (~7 large eggs) room temperature
Vegetable Oil 18 g
Lemon Juice 85 g (~2 lemons)
Lemon Zest from 1 lemon
Vanilla Extract 4 g
Egg Whites 114 g room temperature
Granulated Sugar 105 g
Cream of Tartar 3/4 tsp
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350. Lightly grease pan and line with parchment. If using two-piece tube pan, just lightly grease.
- Sift cake flour, baking powder, salt, and 51 g sugar into mixing bowl. Set aside.
- Mix together egg yolks, vegetable oil, vanilla extract, lemon juice and zest until just combined.
- With the paddle, mix part of the yolk mixture into the dry mixture on medium speed until it resembles a paste/thick batter. Scrape down bowl, and add remaining yolk mixture and beat for 2 minutes.
- In a clean dry bowl whip egg whites on low until frothy. Gradually add remaining sugar and cream of tartar and whip on medium/medium-high until it reaches medium peaks.
- Add one-third of the whites to the yolk mixture and mix to help loosen the batter. Add another third of the whites to the yolks and gently fold. There should be not many white streaks in your batter. Add the remaining whites and fold in. The batter color should be fairly uniform, but a few streaks of white remaining is okay.
- Pour batter into prepared pan. Tap the bottom of the pan to help remove any large bubbles in the pan.
- Bake for 20-30 minutes, or until it springs back when lightly tapped. Cool in pan until slightly warm, then turn out on a rack and allow to cool completely.