Can I Make Individual Lemon Meringue Cakes?

Our answer

Nigella's Lemon Meringue Cake (from FEAST) has thin layers of sponge that are topped with meringue. The two layers are sandwiched with lemon curd and whipped cream. It may be possible to make smaller versions but we suspect that when sandwiched the cakes would not be that stable as they would be quite high and narrow.

So we would not particularly recommend making smaller cakes. But if you wanted to try then the other challenge would be to remove them from a muffin pan as the recipe uses a springform pan for ease of release. The sponge itself is quite tender and the meringue very fragile. You would probably need to put criss-cross strips of baking parchment into the cups of the muffin pan and then line the base of the muffin pan cups with circles of baking parchment. Once the cakes have baked you would need to carefully loosen the meringue from the edges of the pan with a small spatula and then use the strips of parchment to lift out each cake. We suspect that the baking time would be around 15-18 minutes for the cakes. The yield is difficult as normally a 20cm layer cake would make up to 24 cupcakes, but this recipe is slightly different so we would guess at 16-18 halves, to make 8-9 smaller cakes. Please also note that as we have not tried this ourselves, we are unable to guarantee the results.