My sister, Heather, requested the following cake for her birthday this past weekend: strawberries with a light chocolate cake and no icing. I quickly informed her that cake WAS heavy and that I couldn’t possibly make a cake without icing, but I could try a glaze instead of some crazy thick cream cheese icing (which would be MY preference, of course. For me cake is just a delivery system for icing.)

So here is the result in pictures:

The strawberry layer looks super thick here, but really soaked into the cake by the time I served it (with a small scoop of vanilla ice cream in the side, of course).

Here it is completed, but without birthday candles, and smothered in chocolate (Callebaut, semi-sweet) glaze.

What would I change?

1. Bake the four layers separately instead of cutting 2 into 4 (which was finicky and crumbly).
2. Don’t pour ALL the glaze on at once (it didn’t drip as nicely as I wanted on the first pass and I had to dragged it up the sides from the giant pool that formed around the cake.) Plus I think the extra would have been very nice on vanilla ice cream the next day.
3. Add a bit more sugar to the strawberries? I added 1/3 cup to approx. 4 cups of strawberries. The Tasters seemed to disagree on this point which is why I use the ?

My personal feedback? The cake was a little too crumbly for my taste and I did miss the icing BUT it wasn’t my birthday and the birthday girl seemed very happy with it and THAT is the point of Birthday Cakes By Request!