I'm a stay-at-home-mompreneur. I wasn't always at home, but now I am. I was not domestically inclined. I used to cook steak by baking it on a cookie sheet and once tried to make chicken l'orange by plopping a can of frozen orange juice onto some chicken and microwaving it until the plastic container (yes, plastic, I said I couldn't cook) warped.
Thankfully, through trial and error, I have since learned to cook. Recently, one of my daughters requested a strawberry shaped, strawberry flavoured pink cake for her birthday. Unable to find a strawberry cake mix in the grocery store, I "hacked" a recipe. It turned out not too bad, looked okay and tasted fine, except the frosting had crunchy bits in it. My daughter thought it was beautiful and she didn't mind crunchy cake frosting.
Here's the recipe, feel free to use it or edit it as you so desire:
2 white cake mixes in a box
4 teaspoons red cake decorating sprinkles
2 packets of strawberry flavoured drink mix
(I used Crystal Light, but I'm sure KoolAid would be fine, I just couldn't find it in strawberry flavour)
2 canisters of ready-made buttercream cake frosting
1 box of food colouring, I used the variety pack which includes blue, yellow, green and red.
1)Add 4 teaspoons of sprinkles and 2 packets of drink mix to the dry cake mix and complete according to the baking instructions on the box. I made one rectangular cake per box of mix.
2)After the cakes cool turn one cake upside down so the flat bottom is now the top. Spread some pre-made frosting over the top of this cake. You can make your own frosting from scratch if you want. Place the second cake on top.
3)On a sheet of paper draw an outline of a strawberry shape and cut it out. Place it on the cake and cut around it. You can also get really Michaelangelo about it and carve off the edges to give it a more realistic shape.
4) Put some of the frosting into a separate bowl. Add the red sprinkles to the frosting and the red food colouring a few drops at a time and stir it. Keep adding sprinkles and food colouring until you get the desired colour or until you run out of sprinkles and food colouring, like I did.
I also mixed up a separate batch of frosting and coloured it green to use as the strawberry's stem. This required the entire bottle of green food colour plus entire bottles of blue and yellow (blue plus yellow makes green - yay Bachelor of Fine Arts degree) respectively.
5) Apply a thin layer of frosting to all sides of the cake with a butter knife. This is your scratch coat, to borrow a masonry term, and it will prevent crumbs from messing up your final layer of frosting and covers up the colour of the cake.
6) Apply the final layer of frosting to the cake either with a butter knife or use one of those cake decorating kits with the bags and different tips. I had one in the house already so I used the squirt-little-rosebud-dots-all-over technique.
Voila. I am including some photos so you can all
laugh at me take a look at the result.
This is the paper pattern of the strawberry
