This months Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Morven of Food Art and Random Thoughts. She challenged us all with a celebration(!) cake from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking from My Home to Yours. I think the most challenging part of this month’s recipe was deciding in what way I was going to be super daring and creative as I “played around” with the basic recipe. I was pretty comfortable with the basic cake recipe, but I’m a stick-to-the-recipe kind of gal and tinkering makes me nervous.
But as we are bakers who dare, I decided to play around a little….and with delicious results! I’m not a big fan of lemon cake, but I was in the mood for something fruity. I decided to try my hand at a southern strawberry cake using Dorie’s basic recipe. The strawberry flavor comes from the addition of strawberry flavored gelatin and pureed fresh strawberries. I was a little weirded out by the jello thing, to be honest. I went with the Wild Strawberry flavor, because….uh….if it’s wild it’s more natural tasting, right? (FYI….I think “wild” in jello world means more intense normal jello flavor. Regardless, it tasted fine.) I topped each cake layer with a thin smearing of strawberry preserves and then a layer of mascarpone and vanilla enhanced whipped cream. I covered the cake with more of the whipped cream mixture and strawberry halves.
It was simple, but it really was good. The strawberry cake was quite moist and tangy, which contrasted nicely with the light and slightly sweet mascarpone cream topping. I also loved the pink/white contrast when the cake was sliced. Oh. I should also mention that I totally chickened out when it came time to split the layers. Mine didn’t rise very much, and I had a feeling that if I did attempt to split them, there would be a big pile of strawberry cake mush/crumbs in my near future. Not that that would taste bad. My apologies, this was not very daring of me.
I must confess that after paragraph two of this blog, I was served a slice of a fellow Daring Baker’s cake (http://spatuler.blogspot.com/). I retract my statement about not liking lemon cake.
Thanks again to Morven!
But as we are bakers who dare, I decided to play around a little….and with delicious results! I’m not a big fan of lemon cake, but I was in the mood for something fruity. I decided to try my hand at a southern strawberry cake using Dorie’s basic recipe. The strawberry flavor comes from the addition of strawberry flavored gelatin and pureed fresh strawberries. I was a little weirded out by the jello thing, to be honest. I went with the Wild Strawberry flavor, because….uh….if it’s wild it’s more natural tasting, right? (FYI….I think “wild” in jello world means more intense normal jello flavor. Regardless, it tasted fine.) I topped each cake layer with a thin smearing of strawberry preserves and then a layer of mascarpone and vanilla enhanced whipped cream. I covered the cake with more of the whipped cream mixture and strawberry halves.
It was simple, but it really was good. The strawberry cake was quite moist and tangy, which contrasted nicely with the light and slightly sweet mascarpone cream topping. I also loved the pink/white contrast when the cake was sliced. Oh. I should also mention that I totally chickened out when it came time to split the layers. Mine didn’t rise very much, and I had a feeling that if I did attempt to split them, there would be a big pile of strawberry cake mush/crumbs in my near future. Not that that would taste bad. My apologies, this was not very daring of me.
I must confess that after paragraph two of this blog, I was served a slice of a fellow Daring Baker’s cake (http://spatuler.blogspot.com/). I retract my statement about not liking lemon cake.
Thanks again to Morven!
