Believe it or not, you can make this amazing cake with no butter at all. Baking without butter has become my specialty. The cake is simple. It’s my easy one-bowl yellow cake but with half the vanilla and with added fresh lemon zest. (To keep the edges of the cake from over-baking, I suggest using a cake strip.) While the cake bakes, you make a super easy lemon curd for the filling. Then you spread the curd on a big dinner plate to cool.
And now the frosting. I make an old-fashioned seven-minute frosting because it has no butter, and because it’s light and fluffy and delicious. But seven minutes is a lie! It actually takes abut nine minutes to make and here’s why. You need to be at the stove with an electric mixer and you beat the frosting in a glass bowl, over a simmering pot of water. It’s basically egg white and sugar and it makes a beautiful, light and airy frosting that tastes like billows of meringue.
The cake is sliced in half to fill with the lemon curd and then the top of the cake goes back on and it’s frosted all over with 7-minute frosting. After that you sprinkle the top with sweetened shredded coconut and press more coconut on to the sides. The just wait for the raves, especially from lemon-lovers.
If you don’t want to make the frosting and want something simpler, you can slice and fill the cake and just spread it with the lemon glaze that I use on my lemon brownies and sprinkle the top with coconut. Here’s how that looks…
Either way you make it, you’ll have a delicious dessert without butter. Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones