Summer’s never over! The warm season is certainly thriving with a Poolside Cake! This blue velvety lagoon cake is layered with tart and creamy tropical passion fruit curd. Decorated in a semi-naked fashion, the Poolside Cake is styled like one of those frilly vacation drinks. Topped with “whipped cream” cream cheese frosting and green cherries, the Poolside Cake is screaming for you to carve out some time to rest and relax. Stave off the summer’s end with a poolside fantasy!
It’s August. I can’t take that reality. We need a rewind, it needs to be June all over again. Like old men buying corvettes as a midlife crisis car, I needed a summer cake to get me through the reality of the season ending. Poolside Cake was a good summertime fix.
The inspiration came from mid-century cocktails. I had looked through some 1960s Hawaiian cookbooks. When Hawaii became a state in 1959, the continental United States went through a Hawaiian craze. Mock luaus became a thing. Cookbooks gave pictorial instructions to give a spiraled ham a piggy face. The key for a mock-luau pig was cherries for the eyes and pineapple leaves for the ears. There had to be something smothered in teriyaki sauce and something impaled on a stick. And there was some sort of neon colored cocktail.
Originally I wanted this Poolside Cake to be a Blue Hawaiian cake. Yet as I tested the cake with blue Curacao I got pretty gross results. Though Curacao gave the cake a bright blue color, the corn syrup in the liqueur made the cake painfully sweet and hardened the texture of the cake’s crumbs. Think Frisbee like hardness, no eatable cake in sight. Gross, gross indeed.
I had to go back to the drawing board. Finally I switched courses and decided to go less for a Hawaiian theme and more for a poolside theme.
In terms of poolside, I imagined this cake being the same color of a blue pool surrounded by fun umbrellas used to garnish garish drinks. The Poolside Cake has a soft velvety crumb. I chose to do a simple vanilla flavoring, but if you wanted more citrus notes this cake could handle lemon zest. Yet the star of this cake is the filling. After tasting the cake both with and without the citrus zest, I decided not to have the competing flavors.
Passion Fruit curd—where have you been all of my life? When visiting my brother I encountered passion fruit and I was instantly hooked. Tart and strong with flavor, the passion fruit is smoothed out with butter, egg yolks, and more butter. Did I say butter? Naturally passion fruit has a million of these tiny black seeds. The best thing is to buy frozen passion fruit puree at the grocery store. Save yourself the hassle. As I’ve learned with the Pistachio Watergate Cake, the prep work sometimes isn’t worth it.
The Poolside Cake needed a happy garnish. Sure I could’ve used red cherries, but it would’ve given the cake an Americana 4th of July feeling.
Getting inspiration from Sandra Lee’s Colada Cupcakes, I liked the pairing of green and blue. The color scheme was indicative of the crisp summer blue colors. The Poolside Cake is suppose represent a stay-cation, a vacation at home, the blue of the cake is the same color as the vinyl lining of a pool!
It’s not like me to make a semi-naked layer cake. My political stance is pro-frosting so it’s hard for me to leave the Poolside Cake this exposed. To get the crisp blue color, I shaved off the sides of the cake that were inevitably browned from the cake pan. If you cut off the sides of the cake, make sure to chill the cake layers before frosting the cake. The chill time in the freezer will prevent the cake from crumbling excessively.
Anyway, this Poolside Cake will keep the summer spirit afloat! Despite not having a pool, we can all pretend to be lounging underneath a poolside cabana sipping a fun frilly drink!
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- For the Blue Lagoon Cake:
- 3 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
- 3 cups granulated sugar
- 2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
- ¾ teaspoon fine salt
- 2 tablespoons vanilla extract
- 1 cup (abut 6 to 7 each) egg whites, room temperature
- 1 ½ cups buttermilk, room temperature
- ¼ cup vegetable oil
- 1 cup (2 sticks, 8 ounces) unsalted butter, room temperature, cut into small cubes
- Blue food gel
- For the Passion Fruit Curd:
- 1 cup passion fruit puree, thawed
- 9 large egg yolks
- ¼ cup corn starch
- 1 ¼ cups granulated sugar
- ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 cup (2 sticks, 8 ounces) unsalted butter, room temperature, cut into small cubes
- For the Breezy Whipped Frosting:
- ½ cup (1 stick, 4 ounces) unsalted butter, room temperature
- 8 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- pinch of salt
- 4 to 6 cups powdered sugar, sifted
- For assembling the Poolside Cake:
- Green cherries
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray three 8-inch round cake pans with baking spray, set aside.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Mix the dry ingredients on the stir speed.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the vanilla extract, egg whites, buttermilk, and vegetable oil. Set aside.
- On the lowest speed, add the butter to the dry ingredients, a few tablespoons at a time, until the chunks of butter are incorporated and the mixture looks like a fine crumble.
- Continuing on a low speed, add ⅓rd of the wet ingredients to the dry-butter mixture. Turn mixture up to a medium speed and beat until a pale paste-like thick batter forms. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl.
- Add another ⅓rd of the wet ingredients and beat on a medium-high speed to 4 minutes. Again scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl. Pour in the final ⅓rd of the wet ingredients, add the blue food gel, and beat now on a medium speed for a final 5 minutes.
- Divide the batter evenly between the cake pans and bake for 26 to 35 minutes, rotating halfway, until a tooth pick comes out mostly clean (not wet) and the sides begin to pull away from the pan.
- Allow the cakes to rest in the pans for 5 minutes before removing them onto wire racks to cool completely.
- In a heavy bottomed medium-sized sauce pan whisk together the passion fruit puree, egg yolks, corn starch, and sugar. Put the sauce pan over medium-high heat and whisk constantly until the mixture thickens, about 8 to 9 minutes. Once the mixture coats the back of a spoon and when you draw a line through the mixture and your finger leaves a line in the mixture, it’s ready.
- Turn off the heat but leave the sauce pan on the burner. Whisk in the salt. Follow by whisking in the butter, a few cubes at a time, adding more only when the butter is melted and combined with the curd. Once all of the butter is incorporated, pour the curd through a fine mesh strainer to remove any lumps. Pour into a heat-proof container and place plastic wrap over the surface to prevent a skin from forming. Place in the refrigerator until it has hardened about 2 to 3 hours minimum. It can be made 3 days in advance.
- Cream together the butter and cream cheese in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Beat until combine and lump-free, about 3 to 4 minutes. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl. Add the vanilla and salt.
- On the stir speed, slowly add the powdered sugar. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl and then give the frosting a final beat for 45 seconds.
- If the cake layers have domes, use a serrated knife to level off the cakes. To get the crisp blue color, use the same serrated knife to gently scrape off the brown outer bits of the cake. Chill in the freezer for 15 minutes.
- Place the first layer on a cake board and use a pastry bag to pipe a border Breezy Whipped Frosting to create a moat for the filling. Spoon the Passion Fruit Curd into the moat. Repeat this step with the second layer. Top with the final cake layer. Use the remaining frosting to fill in the gaps. Create a dirty layer of the cake and chill in the freezer for a final 15 minutes. Top with a thick smooth layer of frosting. Use pastry bag fitted with a star tip and pipe swirls evenly on the top of the cake. Top each swirl with a green cherry.