Since F and Su have their birthdays one day apart we generally combine them into one celebration. We don’t do anything elaborate, just family and a few friends, and the children get to choose the meal and what kind of cake they’d like.
They are old enough now to really get into the idea of picking the food and cake, and had several discussions with each other before deciding that F would pick the food and Su would pick the cake.
The decision? Pizza (from the pizza car (delivery) and a strawberry cake.? Delivered pizza is a treat, we have pizza several times a month but that is homemade. It’s always very popular (a few weeks ago F and W ate most of a 12×13 pizza with olives and anchovies on it) but not very glamorous (at least if you’re three and four).
And strawberry cake? I knew the important thing was the color (pink). Yes, I know strawberries are red, but strawberry yogurt is pink and that’s what Su was thinking of. So we made a strawberry cake:
one white cake mix
3/4 cup strawberry puree (I had some frozen)
2 T strawberry gelatin
lemon zest
1 tsp of good vanilla
I substituted the puree for part of the water that the cake mix called for and adjusted the baking time slightly (5-10 more minutes).
Here’s what it looked like in the pan:
Strawberry Cake from modified cake mix.
I made two cakes so that I could layer the final version since even limiting the party to family there were nearly twenty people to serve.
After the cake cooled I stacked the layers with a thin amount of icing between then took a sharp knife a cut out a rough strawberry shape. I iced the cake with pink butter-cream icing, with a small amount of green icing for the top. I had some difficulty doing the sides because of crumbs but finally thinned the icing and poured it over the sides then stuck the whole thing in a chest freezer. After they went to bed I pulled it out and studded it with mini chocolate chips for strawberry seeds.
Here’s the finished product:
From the side
From the top.
I think it came out OK and Su was pleased with it…