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.