Chocolate was the request for this birthday, so I obliged with a fudge chocolate cake, chocolate cream cheese icing, chocolate flowers (from Chocolate Arts) and a little bit of fresh local strawberry compote.
Here are the two cake halves, the strawberry filling and the chocolate cream cheese icing, which, I must admit, I (heavily) sampled.
All the cake (above) needs now is birthday candles and a little bit of vanilla ice cream…
YUM! There are still 2 pieces left in the refrigerator… let’s see how long that lasts!
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?
Bake the four layers separately instead of cutting 2 into 4 (which was finicky and crumbly).
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.
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!