Recipe: The Best Lemon-Lime Cake
The owner of Chicago’s Justice of the Pies bakery shares one of her favorite recipes
My Wake-Up Call newsletter (subscribe here!) recently interviewed Chef Maya-Camille Broussard, owner of Chicago’s Justice of the Pies bakery. We spoke about social justice and how her bakery is giving back to the Chicago community.
Now, we’re featuring her recipe for a Lemon-Lime Cake! (Yes, a cake — not a pie, despite her bakery’s name.) Enjoy.
Lemon-Lime Cake
This is a cake recipe, not a pie. Why cake?
When people ask me what my favorite pie is, the answer is usually: “It’s cake.”
My Dad was obsessed with pie, but I’ve always been obsessed with a really good cake. I often try to “cross-pollinate” the two with regards to flavors: Make a classic pie flavor into a cake and make classic cake flavors into a pie.
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups unsalted butter, softened
- 3 cups granulated sugar
- 5 large eggs, room temperature
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tsp lemon extract
- Zest of one whole lime
- Zest of one whole lemon
- 3 cups cake flour
- ½ tsp kosher salt
- ¼ cup sour cream
- 1 cup lemon-lime soda pop
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 325° F.
- Using a standing mixer or a hand mixer, cream butter and sugar together. Add 5 large eggs, add and mix one egg at a time in order to create an emulsion.
- Add the zest of a lemon and a lime, vanilla extract and lemon extract and mix.
- Add cake flour in increments of 1/3, mixing the flour into the batter in-between each increment. Once the cake flour is incorporated into the batter, add salt and sour cream and mix. While mixing the batter, slowly pour in the lemon-lime pop.
- Line a Bundt cake pan with shortening and all-purpose unbleached flour. Pour the cake batter into the cake pan and bake for one hour in the center rack of the oven.
- Test the center of the cake with a knife; if it comes out clean and dry then the cake is ready.
- Remove the cake pan from the oven and allow it to cool for 10 minutes before removing the cake from the pan. If you let the cake cool for too long in while in the cake pan, it may stick to the pan and become more difficult to remove.
This appeared in Katie Couric’s Wake-Up Call newsletter. Subscribe here.