American Baker in Germany

This cake was for the Kindergarten celebration of my daughter's birthday. You know you have to bring something for the kids to celebrate together. Our topic? Strawberries.  So, I baked two layers of 10-inch round strawberry cake dyed pink.  I filled it with strawberry buttercream.  And frosted it with it as well.  I made sure to frost thick enough so you couldn't see the cake through the frosting.  Then I smoothed the frosting pretty well.  Then I filled a piping bag with a French piping tip and strawberry buttercream.  Then I piped dollops onto the top of the cake.  I piped a total of eight dollops regularly spaced around the cake.  Then I piped little points at the bottom of the cake.  And finally, I placed whole strawberries between the dollops on the top of the cake.  This cake is super simple, but absolutely gorgeous.  It's one of those you can tell from the outside what's on the insid...

After trying at least five different strawberry cake recipe and not finding a single one that tasted strongly of strawberries, I decided to try to develop my own. This is a variation of my vanilla cake recipe that I tweaked a bit to be strawberry flavored. I do need to mention one of my ingredients. Strawberry flavoring. Without it, the cake doesn't taste like strawberries. Because actual strawberries don't have nearly as strong a flavor as most people think they do. Most recipes that I found called for dry strawberry jello packet. Um... I have a very hard time finding those in Germany. They probably exist, but they're hard to find. Red jello is raspberry flavored around here. So, if you have it, feel free to use that instead, but around here strawberry flavoring was a lot easier to find.  Strawberry Cake Recipe: 1/3 cup (85g) of butter 2/3 cup (150mL) of oil 2 cups (400g) of sugar 1 tbsp of strawberry flavoring or 1 package of dry strawberry jello 2 3/4 cups (350...

This cake was for my daughter's kindergarten for their St. Martin's Market. Every year in early November they have a bake sale. So, it gives me an opportunity to make a cake. This time, I wanted to make a Fall-themed cake. I asked a friend what flavor I should make. What flavor do her kids like the best? Strawberry. So, I made strawberry cake and had a good amount of leftover strawberry buttercream that I used up for this cake. I started out two days beforehand and used some fall colors: yellow, orange, red and brown to marble some Fall colors and cut out some Fall leaves.  I laid them over a piece of crumbled up foil to dry in a more natural shape. Then I filled my cake with strawberry buttercream and frosted it with it as well.  While the frosting was cooling in the fridge, I cut out a handful of Fall leaves from brown, red, orange and yellow fondant. Some of them were marbled together. I really loved the variety of colors. So pretty!  Then, startin...