You may have been tricked by the grocery store into thinking that strawberries come from California, but this is a sham. The Oregon Strawberry is tiny, short seasoned, and packs so much more sweet sweet flavor than anything our neighbors to the south could ever produce. Enough of a rant about the wonders of Oregon strawberries and back to the subject at hand.
Analysis of the Cake
See previous entry and enjoy these photos of part of the process!
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| The Quest for Perfection includes perfect tools! I finally have a double boiler! All-Clad makes my heart skip a beat or two. |
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| Egg and Vanilla mixture, getting heated up to just the right temperature! |
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| Velvety smooth yellow cake batter. I may have sampled a teensy bit of the uncooked goodness... |
Analysis of the Frosting
As always, the base of our frosting is an Italian Meringue Butter Cream a la Cake Love. After scouring all of my cookbooks for strawberry frosting, I decided that the strawberry puree found in The Cake Bible would be the first runner up in perfecting strawberry frosting. The reason: science. As to be expected by her previously underwhelming recipe, Martha Stewart's solution was to just put strawberries in a blender and mix it in the frosting. Sure, this will indeed give you strawberry frosting but my speculation is that the frosting will be somewhat lackluster. Other cookbooks had concepts similar to The Cake Bible, but did not incorporate quite as much science as I feel is necessary when involving berry flavor extraction and syrup creation. The Cake Bible, however, incorporates a much more complicated yet logical sequence for delivering a wham-bam punch of strawberry. The first step is to freeze the strawberries in order to begin breaking down the enzymes of deliciousness. The strawberries are then thawed in a colander over a series of hours. The sweet sweet juices collected below the colander are then made into a reduction while the remaining strawberry chunks are pureed in ye olde Cuisinart. These are all combined with a splash of lemon juice. This confection may then be added to the base frosting of your choice for a splendiferous delivery of strawberry.
I'm not sure if you can tell, but I kind of geek out over the scientific process of baking. Now, the breakdown:
The Yays
- Holy cow, this captures the essence of everything wonderful that is Oregon strawberries. Perfectly sweet, with a tiny hint of berry tang at the end and all of it encompassed by buttery goodness.
- The strawberry puree freezes up to a year and can be thawed and re-frozen multiple times without damage to the puree according to the author. This excites me greatly as I will be able to enjoy a summertime treat in the middle of winter. That's a win all around!
- The frosting and yellow cake together are a heavenly dream come true and are a better interpretation of strawberry shortcake than actual strawberry shortcake. Amazingness times infinity. This is a winner for sure.
The Nays
- I did the frosting the night before the cupcakes and refrigerated it. Bad call. The consistency wasn't quite right even after re-warming the buttercream to room temperature. So, if crunched for time I would do it in reverse order (cupcakes the night before). This is not the frosting's fault.
- Last time I did a normal batch of frosting (4 cups) for the 18 cupcakes the yellow cake recipe yields and had copious amounts of chocolate frosting left over. In order to be less wasteful I did a half recipe (2 cups) of frosting but now have about 6 naked cupcakes. Something is amiss in measurement land so maybe next time I do yellow cake I should just do a double batch of cake.
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| Waiting to top off some cupcakes! |
