Lemon Cake with Chocolate Buttercream

So my mom had her bookgroup retreat, and she asked me to make a cake. She loved the lemon cake from Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake from her book Baking: From My Home to Yours, and wanted something like that for dessert at her retreat. The book she and her friends read for the retreat, to boot, was The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender (which, by the way, is a pretty good read). So of course I wanted to try and make a cake that looked like the cake on the cover! It was a three layer yellow lemon cake with what looked like milk chocolate buttercream. I ended up making mine a little different, but it still suited the occasion.

I used Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake recipe for the lemon cake, but instead of cutting two layers in half, I wanted a three layer cake, so I split the batter into three pans and baked them for about 25 minutes.

For the frosting, I used Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake lemon buttercream recipe and substituted a fourth a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder for the fourth a cup of lemon juice. I was surprised that it turned out so well: it tasted like chocolate meringue frosting, not chocolate buttercream, and was a good match for the light crumb of the cake.

I took a bit of dark chocolate and made chocolate shavings to put on the sides to make the cake look a little nicer. So my recipe for decorating the cake was to frost between the layers and all over, then press the shavings into the side: perfectly easy and perfectly delicious.