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!

These Are A Few of My Favorite Things: Heidelberg, Germany

There has been serious Mavs fever in Dallas over the past few weeks... and with Mavs fever, comes Dirk fever... and Dirk fever makes us think of the beautiful country of Germany.

The summer after our sophomore year, the two of us and two of our other friends ventured to Europe for a thirty day trip to eight different countries...obviously one of the greatest times of our lives! At one of our many stops we experienced the beautiful city of Heidelberg, Germany. Unfortunately, we only stayed in Heidelberg for one night but it is definitely an area we would love to visit again! Now, y'all can expect many more posts about our glorious trip to Europe but today we wanted to focus on Germany.

Here's our inspiration from Pinterest:

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Below are a few of our own pictures from Heidelberg:

View from the castle

I'll have a drink please... World's Largest Wine Barrel

The main attraction in the tiny town of Heidelberg is the castle. Since we were really only going to have about half of a day to actually explore, we headed right for it, not thinking of the physically demanding consequences we would be embarking upon along the way. When you walk out of the main square to the base of the path to the castle you look up an extremely long and impossibly steep hill. We thought we were in shape after tackling London, Paris, and Amsterdam, but we were oh so wrong. I think we all took about 20 breaks ... it was so steep you felt like your body was slightly sideways.

Enjoy!