Recipe: brown butter and charred lemon cake

With a burnt honey swiss meringue buttercream

The smell of brown butter is one of my favourites; the way its nutty tones waft up into the room and fills the space with its comforting aromas. I use brown butter wherever I can in baking–I would never think to make chocolate chip cookies or blondies without it, and can’t imagine why anyone would. It adds a depth of flavour like nothing else, and I love to watch as the butter melts and transforms from a golden puddle into a bubbling, sputtering cloud of foam, which dissipates to reveal a lake of gorgeous, deeply browned butter.

This cake is an example of how applying intense heat to an ingredient can transform it into something else, something magical. It begins with the charring of the lemon, which creates the an almost caramelised, softer citrus flavour, and using lemon zest as well adds the zing that the presence of lemon promises. Honey is something that I would love to love, but on its own isn’t something that I tend of reach for. Burnt honey, however, I adore. It has a flavour more like golden syrup I find, and the combination of the browned butter, charred lemon and burnt honey in the buttercream is a beautiful medley.

It is a cake with a few steps more than the average layer cake, but it is not a difficult cake to make. It requires a small amount of extra effort that more than pays off.