Garden Strawberry Cake
I made it up. Guess the secret ingredient!
It’s the layer cake recipe from the back of the Swan’s Down Cake Flour box, which I’m writing down here so that I can throw the box away.
Garden Strawberry Cake
2 sticks butter – room temp
2 cups sugar
3 cups sifted Swan’s Down Cake Flour (gramz! I want gramz!)
4 eggs
1 cup milk
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp almond extract
- Preheat oven to 350. Butter and lightly flour 3 9in layer pans (I only have 2; I used 4 8in pans).
- Cream butter. Add sugar. Cream butter more. Add eggs one at a time, continuing to cream it. While that does its thing…
- Do the super annoying 3 cups sifted thing: Sift the flour into a bowl. Lightly scoop 3 cups of flour into yet another bowl. Try to get the remaining sifted flour back into the box while cursing recipes that don’t use grams so you can sift it after you have the right amount.
- Add the salt and powder to the flour.
- Add the vanilla and almond extracts to the milk.
- Alternately beat in flour and milk, letting each step well combine. You’ve turned the mixer down already; we’re beating, not creaming, now. I deny there was a cloud of flour in my kitchen. I swear there was no pillar of fire.
- Pour into pans evenly. Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if you tared the mixing bowl before starting this so you could know how much was “evenly”? I thought so, too. I suppose I could have used that extra bowl sifting the flour got dirty. Next time.
Bake 20-25 minutes, until toothpick comes out clean.
Something went wrong in that step. Not on-fire wrong, but the middles settled. My oven has a “four cakes at once setting” (really, it does; how weird is that?). That setting is the convection oven, which supposedly run hot. I set it at 325. Too cool? Maybe? The top and sides were “golden brown”, not “plain cake” colored. That seems hot enough.
Oh, while you’re waiting for the eggs at butter to come up to room temperature:
- Go out to the strawberry patch
- Pick all the ripe berries.
- Sort out some evenly sized ones for the top.
- Dice the rest. Dicing strawberries is not fast. Getting refrigerated butter up to room temperature is faster.
I recommend hand-washing the mixing bowl and proceeding to the next step while you’re still young, rather than putting it into the Save The Planet(tm) dishwashing appliance. But, you do you.
This is the Red Cupcake frosting/icing/gravy stuff. It’s better than that makes it sound. It’s very sweet gravy. Read on.
Red Cake Frosting
1 cup butter – room temperature
1 cup sugar
see where this is going? Cream butter. Add Sugar while creaming. You can stop now.
1 cup milk
3 Tbl flour
Mix in small saucepan. Bring to boil. Stir a minute or two to cook the flour. Don’t let your gravy burn.
Beat the still hot gravy into the butter and sugar. Once it’s mixed, whip it to get a smooth consistency.
How long you let it cool depends on what you want to do with it. Right now, it’s a runny icing. Let it cool some and it becomes a spreadable glaze. Let it get cold and it’s almost fondant. Fun stuff.
I need an editor. We’re almost done.
If your cake turn-table is not already at the place that’s getting this cake, use that to stack the layers. Or just find a festive plate.
Put down layer one. (These all came out more-or-less the same so I didn’t have any “which one goes where?” angst.)
Glaze the top. Don’t push glaze over the edge. That’s going to be trimmed away. Sprinkle 1/3 (You weighed your diced strawberries so you know how much a third is, right?) across the top.
Repeat; twice, if you used 8in pans.
Trim the slanted edges into a neat cylinder. “Neat” may be aspirational. “Rustic” was achievable.
Pour lots of the glaze on top and coat the sides as it drips down. The neater your cylinder is, the better this works, I assume.
Put the reserved strawberries on top.
Judging by the scraps, it’s delicious. The cake is going to soak up so much strawberry juice over night.
Update: I was closing browser tabs for the night and I re-read this. Congratulations, you’ve just met Luke. That’s exactly what he sounds like. I had no such plan; I was possessed.
Marked Up 