Fresh Fraisiers - July 2011 Daring Baker's Challenge

A fresh strawberry cream cake....  A lovely delicious challenge hosted by Jana from Cherry Tea Cakes.

It would be a much more fun event or events for us had it been summer for us... part of the pain being in the south hemisphere is that we don't have the seasonal fruits as the north - strawberries can be found but quite expensive, so are other berries and summer fruit.  After my first attempt, I realised I could've used kiwi fruit which we can find quite a lot in the supermarkets lately, but the second attempt never took place, Luke's birthday, school production, and Bianca's school production took most of our time, plus the house renovation....

Apart from hubby, the children are not too keen on cream cakes, don't ask me why, but they are chocoholics, and whenever there's a chance to ask for a cake, it's always, chocolate cake, especially for Luke, chocolate mud, he wouldn't even take sponge.

I didn't want to make the the cake too big, the fresh cream wouldn't keep.  The original recipes for the challenge can be found here:

First of all, I wanted to make a small heart shaped Red Velvet Strawberry Stack Cake....
Red velvet for the Red strawberries, always wanted to make a red velvet cake.

I used the recipe by Nigella Lawson for Red Velvet Cupcakes, but changed the frosting to cream cheese frosting because of the Creme Fraisier...

FOR THE CUPCAKES



• 250g plain flour
• 2 x 15ml tbsp cocoa powder, sifted
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 100g soft unsalted butter
• 200g caster sugar
• 1 x heaped 15ml tbsp Christmas-red paste food colouring
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 175ml buttermilk
• 1 tsp cider vinegar or other vinegar
• 2 x 12-bun muffin tins

CREAM CHEESE FROSTING
• 100g icing sugar (no need to sift if using a processor)
• 250g cream cheese
• 250g fresh cream
• 1 tsp lemon juice

I made 4 small heart shaped cake for my strawberry stack and 6 big cup cakes using the Texax Muffin Tin.

It's very hard to line the cakes, as I found out they are pretty fragile so I couldn't slice them thinner as I planned... 

And I got a bit too ambitious stacking all the 4 cakes up....

But thanks to Nigella, the flavour of the cake was really really good...

And for the cup cakes... I brought them to the little get together with girl friend and got welcomed by her children...