Five lemon cakes enter… Only one wins. By being the tastiest.

With “Game of Thrones” season two airing and not one but two cookbooks for the novels being released, I knew I wanted to make lemon cakes for the premiere. The problem: I found five lemon cake recipes and wanted to make them all. This lead to the formation of Battle Lemon Cake, in which every other week (give or take) I make a lemon cake recipe to represent one of the five rulers bidding for the Iron Throne- George R. R. Martin calls them Kings in the Appendixes even though Daenerys is most certainly a woman. Psh. Regardless of the semantics, only one lemon cake can be crowned the ultimate champion of Battle Lemon Cake. Unfortunately for them, they will all be eaten.

NOTE: This page will be updated as each of the five recipes are made and tasted. Keep on eye on this post between now and June 3rd to find out the winner!

Lemon Cake #1 (Lemon Cakes)

FOR: Renly Baratheon, the King in Highgarden
FROM: Tom Colicchio’s Taste of Westeros Food Truck – Recipe Here

Just like these cakes, Renly is flamboyant, fun, and well liked, but a little pompous and full of himself. The recipe showed its pompousness by the whites and yolks of the eggs having to be separated and the cake having to cook in individual ramekins in a water bath. Not to mention being made by Tom Colicchio automatically labels them hoity toity. Putting together the batter also created a huge mess, which we all know Renly would do if he took the Iron Throne, he’s only 21 after all. Despite this, the cakes were delicious and had nice crunchy bottoms when they were inverted. Loras Tyrell might also agree that Renly has a nice hard bottom. Bom chicka wah wah. These cakes tasted much better once completely cooled down because they had time to fully come together, so I would recommend waiting to eat them until they’re cold. It’s hard to do, but I believe in you! Insert joke about Stannis preferring Renly’s body cold here. Ultimately, this recipe was yummy but not necessarily worth the time, effort, mess, or low yield amount (only 4 cakes in my 4.5 ounce ramekins). Not that many A Song of Ice and Fire fans would expect a Renly inspired dessert to last long in Battle Lemon Cake anyway.

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Red Velvet Chocolate Chip Waffles.

I have this problem where I need to follow a recipe. I can’t just make things up off the top of my head like everyone on the Food Network can. Thankfully I am pretty good at “adjusting” things to fit my needs. I started with a simple recipe for waffles and turned them into red velvet inspired waffles with chocolate chips. (I say inspired because there’s no buttermilk). In hindsight I should have made blue velvet waffles so I could quote the film this entire post.

Adapted from the non brand name box of all purpose baking powder’s recipe for waffles:

Red Velvet Chocolate Chip Waffles:
2 cups of all purpose baking powder (AKA Bisquick)
1 and 1/4 cups of milk
2 large eggs (size doesn’t really matter- that’s what he said)
1/2 cup of cocoa powder
1/4 cup of sugar
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips
red food coloring
a waffle iron (if you don’t own a waffle iron, make pancakes)
flour, in case you do something wrong and are out of all purpose baking powder
confectioner’s sugar

Makes 4 round Belgian sized waffles if you’re not very careful about measuring or scraping the bottom of the bowl for all the batter.

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Ninja Turtle Icebox Cookies.

I like baking, but am not the most adept baker. For one, I often do not pay enough attention to directions, nor am I ever able to prepare things in the prescribed amount of time. Instead I work through a process of trial, error, and problem solving skills. Case in point: I started off this recipe as an attempt to make penguin cookies.

Adapted from Diamonds for Dessert’s recipe for Penguin Icebox Cookies:

Vanilla Icebox Cookie Dough:
2 and 1/4 cups plus 5 tablespoons of flour
16 tablespoons/2 sticks of butter, softened
3/4 cup of sugar
1/2 cup of powdered sugar
2 egg yolks
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

Ninja Turtle Additions:
decorating gel (black, purple, orange, red, and blue)
neon food coloring (green and blue)
turtle power

Makes 4 dozen cookies; 16 by the time you feed the wonky looking ones to the dog, throw out the ones you broke or under cooked, and get rid of the ones you used sharpie on just to see how it looks.

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Battle Lemon Cake

Ninja Turtle Icebox Cookies
Purple Pony Glitter Party
Red Velvet Chocolate Chip Waffles