Whipped browned butter cake with lemon curd and whipped frosting

So I've made several vanilla or white cakes from scratch. Every time I make one, they taste terrible. So I was researching a lemon curb recipe and came across a lemon curd cake recipe. I've been wanting to make lemon curd forever, I've always been a little nervous making a curd because I was afraid of the curd.... curdling haha. I've made lemon bars before that came out o-mazing, thank you Fresh Market for turning me into a lemon lover. So I saw this recipe and the cake looked really good. I crossed my fingers as I followed the whipped browned butter cake recipe and to my surprise, the cake was the best butter cake that I've ever had!

The cake was a process, I'm not going to lie. The curd recipe called for 8 eggs and the cake called for 6. The curd called for 2 and a half sticks of butter and the cake called for 3. I had to brown 3 sticks of butter.

The browned butter cake and I've never browned butter for any kind of baked good, I didn't think that I would like it, but it tasted amazing and I'm going to try more browned butter recipes in the future, they are just a lot of work. I had to brown the butter and then let the butter cool a bit, before I put the butter back into the fridge to firm up again, like a stick of butter, straight out of the fridge.

I had to beat the cold browned butter until fluffy for about 5 minutes and then I added my sugar and had to beat for 10 minutes. I added my eggs, mixing after each egg, so that took about 5 minutes. Then added part of my flour mixture and part of my milk until everything was combined. The batter was thick and the cake baked great, I only had to even off one of the cakes and hardly had to touch it. Oh and I used a hand held mixer! My stand mixer is broken.

The curd started off with juicing 10 lemons by hand, because I don't have a lemon juicer, that was fun. The curd came out ok, I think that I would use a different recipe next time though, I'm not sure if it had too many eggs in it or not.

Assembling the cake was a bit of a challenge because the curd kept on making the layers slide, so I had to secure the cake with dowels. The cake was for my brother in law's birthday and I guess I kind of forget to let everyone know, so the game of the night was to try to figure out who had a lucky dowel and who didn't. I think that it went over well.

I tried a few different recipes for the candied lemon slices, the first attempt was a failure, wasted 2 cups of sugar and 2 lemons on that one. I ended up cutting the lemon thin, threw them on a pan with some parchment and sprinkled some sugar on top and baked on the lowest temp until the lemon slices were dried out to my liking. I used the candied lemon slices as a garnish.

Samoas!!

The samoa is my favorite girl scout cookie, it's insanely delicious and insanely expensive, but after making these from scratch, I understand why. The cookies took me 3 hours to make and those 3 hours didn't include the time for the chocolate to set up.

The shortbread was really good and it's a recipe that I would use again, maybe I'll use this recipe for my annually cookie cook off. It just took a lot of work to get the dough at a good enough temperature to roll out and cut shapes that kept shape, the recipe contains baking powder, so the cookies don't hold their shape as much as a true shortbread cookie, but it's a pretty good hold for a recipe that calls for baking powder. The cookies were super soft and tasty, as appose to a shortbread cookie that you almost break your teeth on.

The caramel that I used, I wasn't too happy with, it wasn't soft enough and when the cookies set up, you could tell, it didn't melt to my liking either. The caramel made the topping difficult to spread on the cookies.

The coconut that I used wasn't thin like the coconut used in a real samoa, and it was sweetened. I toasted it and it tasted great, but the texture was off. So next time I'll use raw shredded coconut.

The chocolate was Hersey's semi sweet chips and I think next time I'll use a higher quality chocolate because the chocolate didn't set up the way that I wanted. I guess you get what you pay for. Dipping the cookies in the chocolate was kind of difficult, but after the first 4, I did better.

All in all the cookie's came out tasting exactly like a real samoa cookie, but the topping was on the hard side, due to the soft caramel's that were too hard. And the chocolate didn't set up enough for me. With a few tweaks, this could be a excellent recipe.