These Are a Few of Our Favorite Things: Italian Cream Cake with Strawberries

Horray for Friday!! We hope everyone had an efficient and successful work week. My German relatives are spending their last weekend in America so I thought I would make a delicious cake for the weekend. I logged onto Pinterest and found this delectable Pin: 

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It's an Italian cream cake with strawberries. Obviously I had to try this cake. This recipe wasn't too difficult, but I was very happy to have my Grandmother's (we call her Nomie) help. The recipe calls for the basic ingredients, butter, sugar, flour, but you have to separate the egg whites for one of the 3 mixtures you have to make. Here's how our cake turned out:

Man oh man was it good! Personally, it's the best cake recipe I've tried! I think the trick is folding the egg whites into the butter, buttermilk, and flour mixture. 

A little advice before making this cake:

1. If you want the strawberries to really stand out in this cake be sure to buy enough strawberries (we almost ran out).

2. Be sure to have the eggs & butter at room temperature, this really makes a difference!

3. Use 3 separate round cake pans, if you only have two don't try and bake two layers and wait to bake the third layer when the other two have cooled, the cake batter will go bad!

4. Make sure you have greased and floured the round cake pans.

Seriously people, you gotta try this recipe! Enjoy!

Yankee Doodle Dandy Cake: Our First Epic Fail

Well friends, Kelsey has left to go to Charleston and Hilton Head for the next week, so you are stuck with just me :)

The Fourth of July is an especially important day in my family because my mom's birthday is on the fourth. Every year, she not so discreetly reminds us that the fireworks are as much for her as anything else. (Sorry mom, I had to spill the beans).

Anyway, we saw this amazing Red, White, and Blue, Independence Day Cake and thought it could serve as a duel purpose this weekend, as both a celebration of the good ole' US of A's freedom and also as my madre's birthday cake.

If you browse and drool over the food pins, like I do, you have probably seen rainbow cakes posted like the two below.

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I am pretty sure that there is not a more festive cake that exists than a perfectly frosted cake that surprises you by turning totally neon when you slice it open. I mean, come on. It is just grand.

So when I saw this lovely patriotic version , I knew I would be making it sometime soon, as in ASAP.

 

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So I did, and it was such a COMPLETE failure. Let's start with the cake recipe... it used way too much almond extract and just tasted really off and not fluffy or moist at all. The marshmallow butter cream frosting was equally off, and had a terrible consistency that made the cake layers slide off each other and would not allow the icing to stick at all.

Here is what my catastrophe looked like:

This is after I physically lifted each iced layer apart and re-layered it in hopes the

 icing would chill the heck out.

I know it doesn't look that bad, but it tasted AWFUL. The cake was much worse than the icing, but icing should never be of questionable taste either.

I was super sad it turned out so badly, but knew it is probably the first of many things we try that don't go as planned.

So, how should you make this kind of cake without the flop?

1) Use cake mix, duh. Just buy plain ole' white cake mix and use food coloring for each layer. I will warn you that when I made the real version I used a ton of food coloring, so don't be skimpy with it. IE: pretend like the smurfs have lost all color and have turned white and you are responsible for coloring them back blue. THAT, is how much food coloring you will need.

2) Use a different frosting recipe. This one was no bueno. It is a recipe from the Lily White flour recipe that was linked to the pin we found of it.

I know that is basically changing the entire process, but the result should be MUCH better!

Happy Fourth of July everyone!!!