Time for a berry-tastic, berry-delicious, straw-baby bday cake!
Don’t be fooled by how delightfully pink this cake is. It’s manly on the inside.
The first step was for my sous-chef and I to gather all of the ingredients for this recipe from Southern Living. Don’t worry, all he did was sit around and supervise. Sheesh! There were lots of berries in this cake, but I think the main differences from your standard cake was the use of cake flour (ooh, fancy) and egg whites instead of whole eggs. Luckily I had some frozen egg whites in the freezer, so I didn’t have to throw any of the yolks at my sous-chef.
Have I mentioned this trick before about butter? When the recipe calls for “softened” butter, but all you have is cold butter and you don’t have time to wait (because it’s 8pm and you’re only just now getting around to baking)…you can smash it with a rolling pin, and it works just as well. Neat trick!
Butter and sugar go into the blender. Then the egg whites are added slowly and whipped for a couple of minutes. It’s not the same as whipping them like you would for a meringue. I think you’re just whipping them enough to get a little air in there.
This mixture is poured into 2 cake pans and then into the oven.
Next up: berries. These bad boys are going to get blitzed in a minute.
Half the berries went into the blender with a little sugar. Then it went into a saucepan to get hot and bubbly. We’re making a straw-baby mousse…this will go in between the cake layers.
Then I had some fun by adding gelatin to the berry mixture. This is unflavored gelatin with a little water. It’s pretty odd looking at this stage. I didn’t take any more pictures of this because there isn’t much to see. The gelatin is mixed into the berry sauce and then it goes into the fridge to cool down. It thickens up a little bit, but not much (it will thicken more after a couple hours).
The cooled strawberry gelatin is then mixed with some whipped cream. I have to say, the strawberries were smelling really good at this point!
That’s some pink mousse!
The cakes have cooled, and I managed to get them out of the pans. That was rather tricky. Next time I’ll put parchment paper down on the bottom to make it easier to get them out. Meanwhile, some of the cake bits were still left in the pan and I was able to steal a taste (shhh!).
The last step was making the icing. More straw-babies were cut up into tiny bits and then mixed with butter and powdered sugar. I actually went overboard on the berries, so the icing came out a bit runny. I guess it’s possible to have too much of a good thing :-(
Time to assemble! Cake, straw-baby mousse, then more cake. Sous-chef Oscar says I missed a spot. This actually has to go back into the fridge for a couple of hours in order for the mousse to set. Otherwise you’d have a sloppy cake running all over the place.
The next day, I topped it off with icing and decorated with sliced berries. Sometimes getting older is totally worth it!
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