Ahoy-hoy.
So to get a handle on my ever-growing collection of “Recipes to Try” on Pinterest, I figured I should get my ass in gear (what?) and start working my way through the huge backlog (176 recipes) pinned there. It’s become a repository for recipes that time forgot.
To that end and for my own record-keeping, I’m going to make 1 recipe from Pinterest every week and recount my failures and victories in this blog. You can find the board with the 52 recipes here.
This week, I started with a fresh strawberry cake with strawberry buttercream from The Baker Upstairs.
So first, it’s obviously not strawberry season anymore. I didn’t want to get out-of-season, picked-green-and-shipped strawberries in the cartons (’cause I figured they would be icky), so I opted to use frozen strawberries for this recipe.
This cake gave me a pretty good excuse to go and buy those spring-form pans I’ve always wanted. Note: I couldn’t find 8″ pans at Target, so I just got 9″ pans (so my cake was definitely flatter than the recipe cake).
I even bought cake flour for this. CAKE FLOUR.
(On the right, that’s some of my blood, sweat and tears.)
(My cute, flat little cake pancakes.)
For the frosting, I went a little rogue: The recipe called for 2 Tbsp of strawberry puree. Well, I added that and tasted it and thought it needed way more strawberry… so I added (kind of a ton) more. I’m guessing I put about 1/2 cup into the frosting alone. It still stood up well so I don’t have any regrets.
All in all: happy with the result. It was a pretty dense cake, but I think that’s baker error (the butter that I cut into the cake batter really wasn’t cold enough, and my pans were just too damned wide). It tasted really good, though. I brought it to my Mom’s house for a bonfire, and a grand total of 4 people almost plowed through the entire cake!
Result: I’m 5 lbs fatter.
Will make again!
BabsIrish 