High Altitude Lemon Sheet Cake
Moist lemon sheet cake, made with fresh lemon zest and lemon juice, frosted with fluffy lemon buttercream.
All recipes on Curly Girl Kitchen are developed for high altitude at 5,280 feet. See FAQs for adjusting to higher or lower elevations.
Equipment
- Stand Mixer with Paddle Attachment
Ingredients
Cake
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- zest of 1 small lemon
- 1 ½ cups cake flour, fluffed, spooned and leveled
- 1 ⅛ tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp coarse Kosher salt (if using table salt, use half the amount)
- 1 large egg
- 1 large egg white (save the extra yolk for another use)
- ⅔ cup whole milk
- ¼ cup full fat sour cream
- ½ cup vegetable oil
- ½ tsp vanilla extract
- ¼ cup fresh or bottled lemon juice
Buttercream
- 1 cup unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- 2 tsp meringue powder, optional
- ⅛ tsp coarse Kosher salt (if using table salt, use half the amount)
- 1 ½ tsp lemon extract
- 1 tsp fresh lemon zest
Instructions
Cake
- Preheat the oven to 350 F, and position a rack in the center of the oven.Spray an 8-inch square baking pan with non-stick baking spray. If you're planning on turning the cake out of the pan to frost it, rather than frosting and serving it in the pan, you should also line the pan with parchment paper to ensure easy release, since lemon cake is sticky.
- In a bowl, use your fingers to rub the lemon zest into the sugar until moist and fragrant.
- Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt, then whisk until evenly distributed.
- Add the egg, egg white, milk, sour cream, oil, vanilla and lemon juice, and whisk until combined.
- Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake the cake for about 30-32 minutes, until the top springs back when gently touched and a toothpick or cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean.
- Set the pan on a cooling rack and cool completely before frosting.
Buttercream
- In the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter for 1 minute until smooth. With the mixer on low, add the powdered sugar, meringue powder, salt, lemon extract and lemon zest, mixing until combined.
- Increase the speed to medium, and beat for about 4-5 minutes, until light and fluffy, scraping the bowl down several times.
- Frost the cake with the buttercream. If you like, fit a piping bag with Tip 1M, fill with leftover buttercream, and pipe a few rosettes and drop flowers on top of the cake.
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