Pinterest Pledge {recipe}

It's a new year and I hope good things will happen for me and my family. I have plans to attend Comic-Con with my friend Kelly this summer in San Diego. I'm optimistic that Jeff and I will be embarking on new careers this year. I plan to improve my health, read more, spend more time with friends and family, and make daily attempts to be pleasant. I will continue with my Pinterest Pledge because I find it fun and it gives me something to blog about when I have no creativity sparking a post. I made my mother a birthday cake this weekend using a Pinterest recipe. I loooove the Limoncello creme torte from the Cheesecake Factory

and I found a copycat recipe on Pinterest last year.

This was the most complicated cake I have ever made. There were so many steps! The cake part was easy except I burned one of the layers (and it split when I flipped it onto the cooling rack) so it had to be a two layer cake rather than three layers. 

I'm still learning about all the baking issues with the oven so this will become part of the long tally I've already got going. The cake layers needed to cool completely but I also added a little Limoncello/fresh lemon juice concoction on top. The recipe said to be careful and not make the cake too soggy so I may have been a little too conservative with it. Then came the filling. This was my first time using Mascarpone cheese. The filling tasted really good and I have some left to put over fresh strawberries (two layers instead of three equals extra filling).

The only thing that I didn't like about the filling is the color didn't stand out against the color of the cake layers when it was cut so it wasn't obvious there even was a filling.

The frosting was last thing to mix and it had the biggest punch of lemon of all the steps. 

This cake had lemon extract, fresh lemon juice, and Limoncello. I was afraid it would all be too overpowering but it really wasn't. 

This is the final glorious result. This sucker was delicious! So refreshing and yummy. However, it did not taste like the Cheesecake Factory Limoncello creme torte as promised. The Cheesecake Factory version has a much denser cake, lots of different kinds of texture, and their version tastes better. I have tons of Limoncello leftover (which I had to purchase at the liquor store--so racy!) so I'll most likely make this again and again to get my money's worth. I have a chicken recipe I'd like to try next week and I'm still working out the details on my craft but I know what I want to tackle.