I decided to make my mom a (late) birthday cake. Her birthday fell on Easter this year and with everything going on I didn’t have the time to make her anything, so better late than never!
I will admit, I bought the angel food cake. They are like $4 at the grocery store so I didn’t want to spend all the time making it myself. I cut it in half horizontally so that I could slip a layer of strawberries in the middle.
Filling recipe:
2 cups chopped fresh strawberries
3 tbsp pureed fresh strawberries
Then I put the lid on and made fresh strawberry butter cream (YUM!)
I had some trouble with the butter cream… needless to say, it’s pretty heavy for an angel food cake. I hadn’t really thought that one through. My problem was when it came to frosting the outside where the filling is. I put quite a tall pile of filling in there, so there was a wide section to frost with just strawberries. They started coming out a little and getting stuck in my frosting. I ended up putting half of the butter cream in a ziploc and piping a flat blob across the filling section and smoothing it upwards to “stick” it to the cake part. Here is the finished frosted product:
I started getting low on butter cream as I was trying to figure out how to frost the inside of the angel food cake.. so I just kinda blobbed it in as best I could. Didn’t have enough frosting to make it all the way down to the bottom but no one will notice, right? 🙂
I started cleaning up and forgot to put the cake straight in the fridge. I started drooping a little on the sides so I fixed it up quick and stuck it in the fridge to harden up.
When I decided a few weeks back that I wanted to make a strawberry butter cream, I started looking online for recipes and didn’t really find anything that suited what I was looking to do… So I used my own vanilla buttercream recipe and adapted it a bit. Here is what I ended up with:
1 stick butter, softened
1 16oz box powdered sugar
3 tbsp + 1 tsp fresh strawberry puree
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp milk
I just mix everything together at once, and probably a little longer than I should. It’s easier to frost the cake when the butter cream is a little airy and “whipped.”
Let me tell you – this butter cream is AMAZING. I will be bringing the cake to my mom in a little bit and we won’t eat it until later. I will try to get a pic of it cut to put in here later with an update on how good it tastes all together!
**Strawberry disclaimer: by fresh I mean I drove out to the strawberry fields and bought strawberries that were picked this morning! Being in N. California I am spoiled and have easy access to the best strawberries! I mean look how red they are!
UPDATE-
The cake was amazing, of course. I love the buttercream, I will definitely be using this recipe again! I probably won’t use it on angel food cake though, it was very sweet, and I’m not a huge fan of super super sweet or super super rich things. Here is the inside of the cake photo, as promised:
Cookie Carrie 