Cathy
My husband often calls me a dork. Up until I started writing this post, I just figured it was flirty teasing. But no, he’s right.
I was going to start off by explaining my process of brainstorming a cake for a special occasion. In short, I stay up late at night thinking of flavors, designs, recipes, and the final vision for the cake. Then I get so excited to get started that I can’t fall asleep for another few hours.
So I guess it’s true. I am a dork.
The vision I have for a cake is always rainbows and butterflies. When it actually comes to baking the cake, some recipes don’t always turn out the way I imagined. That was the case for this one. After 6 hours of disappointed, I wasn’t ready to let go of the idea of a strawberry flavored cake. 6 hours attempted to avoid cake mix and artificial strawberry flavor, that’s where I ended up.
Not my finest moment, but – hey, look at how pretty this cake is!
I ended up using a strawberry flavored cake mix, and baking in a 6inch cake pan. I filled and topped with a lemon curd whipped cream (recipe below) with a white chocolate decor and macerated berries.
To macerate berries, just toss the berries in some granulated sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice. There really is no wrong way to do this. The sugar and lemon juice will draw out some juice from the berries to soften them and give them a nice, syrupy, shiny coating.
Lemon Curd
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup lemon juice about 2.5 lemons
- 2 whole eggs
- 6 egg yolks
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1/3 envelope gelatin powder 1 sheet or 3g
- 11 tbsp unsalted butter cut in pieces
- 1/2 lemon zest & juice
- Preparation:
- 15 min
- Cooking:
- 5 min
- Ready in:
- 2 h 20 min
Instructions
- Whisk together the sugar, yolks and eggs
- Add lemon juice, and whisk to combine
- Cook over a hot water bath, continually stirring until thickened
- Add bloomed gelatin with juice of 1/2 a lemon and stir to dissolve into curd
- Strain through a fine sieve
- Blend in the lemon zest and butter
- Cover directly with plastic wrap to prevent skin from forming.
- Chill before using
Notes
Lemon Curd Whipped Cream
Ingredients
- 2 2/3 cup lemon curd recipe link below (718g)
- 1 1/3 cup heavy cream (364g)
Instructions
- Whip cream to soft peaks
- Fold in lemon curd when the curd is cool, but not set
- Chill until firm enough to pipe
Notes
Blending the butter into the lemon curd. 
Cream is whipped to soft peaks.
Lemon curd is folded into the whipped cream. Make sure you chill so it is firm enough to pipe!
Originally, this is how I had envisioned this cake, but doesn’t it look like stacked pancakes?
Smoothed out the cream on the sides, took out a layer (was broken and started sagging), and piped the top with a star tip instead. Voila!
For this specific cake I baked off 5 layers in different pans (instead of slicing a large cake into 5 layers). I ended up with a lot of scrap pieces (the domes cut off from each layer and an extra layer I ended up not using). I assembled another (very messy) cake and cutting a mini one out of it.
Not the prettiest but look – a mini 6 layer cake!