blowing up the oven: Irma's lemon cake with lemon-filling & lemon-butter frosting

So January 18th was my friend Irma's birthday and I wanted to make her a scratch lemon cake. This was a pretty rushed job but I think it turned out decent.
So I needed two cake pans and I also bought a cake leveler so that I could keep the levels in the cake relatively flat and even. So, now for ingredients:

CAKE:
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter
1 1/4 cup white cane sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup milk

FILLING:
1 tbsp grated lemon zest
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
1 tbsp cornstarch
6 tbsp butter
3/4 cup white cane sugar
4 egg yolks, beaten

FROSTING:
4 cups confectioners' sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 tsp grated lemon zest
2 tbsp milk

Phew. This one looks hefty! [that's what she said] So first thing I did was mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. In another large mixing bowl I creamed together the sugar and butter.

I let the mixer beat it for about 5 minutes until it was nice and puffy, I mean FLUFFY. Once I got the amount of fluffiness I desired, I added the 3 eggs - one at a time - and then added the vanilla extract.

And then I beat in the flour mixture with the milk but alternately, not all at once.

^I tried making a video of the mixer mixing the milk in, so we will see how it actually looks.^
So after that I made sure to grease and flour the cake pans. Pre-heated the oven to 350°

pouring......................................

Next was baking for about 30 minutes.

While the cake part was baking, I began on the filling. In a saucepan, I mixed together the 1 tbs lemon zest (that I had just freshly grated), 1/2 cup lemon juice and 1 tbsp cornstarch. I mixed that up in the pan until it got smooth.

Mixed in 6 tablespoons of butter and 3/4 cup of sugar.

I brought that mixture to a boil over medium heat, let it boil for one minute, constantly stirring. In a separate bowl I beat the 4 egg yolks until they were smooth and kind of frothy.

I then poured the yolks into the hot lemon mixture, continuing to stir the mixture rapidly. I turned the heat down to low and continued to rapidly stir for about 5 minutes. The mixture got thick by this point.

The next step was to pour the mixture into a bowl, cover it in plastic wrap and let is sit in the refrigerator for 3 hours. Yikes! I didn't realize that and I was running out of time, so I put it in the freezer for probably about 40 minutes.

Next it was about time to remove that cake from the oven.

While the cake cooled down a bit, I started on the lemon frosting. So, in the mixer bowl I mixed the confectioners' sugar, 1/2 cup of butter, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and 1teaspoon of lemon zest. Once that was smooth, I beat in the 2 tablespoons of milk and increased the mixing speed until it was light and fluffy.

fluffy

Next came the construction of the cake.

First I used the cake leveler to cut each baked cake layer into two thinner levels. This creates a total of 4 cake layers.

cake leveling

Then a layer of filling is spread out on the first layer of cake. I used half of the filling because the rest will be used on another layer of the cake.

Next I put another layer of cake and spread that with a layer of frosting.

The third layer of cake was added and covered with the rest of the lemon filling.

This all should have been done on a real nice cake platter or something, but I was rushing myself and I was taking it to go, so it stayed in one of the baking pans. Ghetto, but still effective I guess. Once the 4th cake layer was added, then it was just frosted to cover the entire cake. I had excess frosting left over, but I also didn't have to frost the bottom layer that was covered by the cake pan.