STRAWBERRY CAKE – NO ARTIFICIAL COLOUR OR FLAVOUR ADDED!

There are a lot of recipes out there for brightly coloured, pink strawberry cakes and to be honest, I haven’t liked many of them. When you search around on the web for Strawberry Cake, or see beautiful examples on Pinterest, I’m very often disappointed to find that they are mostly flavoured and coloured by adding strawberry jelly powder and/or food colouring to the recipe.

With so many people having sensitivity to food colouring, especially those in the red spectrum, I wanted to try to come up with a pretty pink cake recipe to share in time for Mother’s Day in about a week’s time. I will not say that I was immediately successful in my attempts at a strawberry cake; one of them was so heavy and dense that it went straight into the garbage bin.

I tried using straight strawberry puree which did not colour or flavour the cake enough. I needed to concentrate both the colour and the flavour of the strawberries before I added it to the cake batter and the frosting.

I decided to make a slowly simmered and greatly reduced simple strawberry jam for this purpose and when pureed, it worked very well in both the cake and the frosting. I think the strawberry frosting is pretty essential to this cake as it really does help to carry that authentic strawberry flavour.

Ingredients
For the strawberry jam puree

• 3 cups very ripe sliced strawberries
• 1/2 cup sugar

For the cake batter

• 3/4 cup butter
• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 eggs
• 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 cup cake flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 1/4 cups whipping cream
• 3/4 cup strawberry jam puree

For the Strawberry Frosting

• 6 cups icing sugar powdered sugar
• 1 cup room temperature butter
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup strawberry jam puree
• a little milk if necessary
• US Customary - Metric

Instructions

1. To prepare the strawberry jam puree
2. You will need to prepare this puree in advance so that it has time to cool before being added to the cake batter.
3. In a small saucepan combine the strawberries and sugar and bring them to a gentle simmer.
4. .......................................

for full instruction please see : www.rockrecipes.com

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