Monday, July 27, 2009

My First Cake

My neighbor called me last week and asked if I would make a cake for her daughter's 9th birthday. After taking a couple of classes my confidence is a bit better, I'm still no great cake decorator, but figured I need the practice so I told her yes. Now to me, if a cake isn't chocolate somewhere in there it just isn't worth the calories, but her daughter doesn't like chocolate (I know, strange child), so she wanted a strawberry cake with pink frosting. Talk about pink overload. And having never made a strawberry cake before, I wasn't sure where to begin. I've seen strawberry cake mixes, but I refuse to go that route. So I found a strawberry cake recipe from scratch, and made some cupcakes from it to test on some other friends. They liked it, so the cake part was figured out. I still needed a filling. I don't really like filling cake with just more frosting, too sugary, too much frosting, besides I wanted a strawberry filling. I was hesitant to use just fresh strawberries because they can mold once in the cake and they are very wet and and all that extra moisture leaches into the cake. I thought a curd filling might be nice, I love lemon curd, and wondered if I could do a strawberry curd. I couldn't find any recipes for strawberry curd, so I adapted a lemon curd recipe, but the results were not what I wanted. Unfortunately a waste of ingredients. But a learning lesson at least. I ended up finding a strawberry cream cake filling recipe and gave that a try. It uses fresh strawberries, sugar, water, gelatin and some cream, that's it. But the consistency is very jello like. I tried thinning it with some extra cream, and went ahead and used it in the final cake, I'll have to wait for some feedback. I asked my neighbor to pick out some flowers that she wanted used, she chose yellow mums, white daisies, and pink primroses. Mums are not my favorite to make, but at least I got some extra practice making them for the cake, and I think I greatly increased my mum making ability. So the final product is a strawberry cake with strawberry cream filling with pink butter cream frosting. Pink overload it is, but for a little girl, hopefully it will please.

1 comment:

Jessica said...

Dawn that cake is freakin' GORGEOUS! Why can't we live in the same city anymore? You did a beautiful job and I hope it was appreciated!!! Can't wait to see more creations...