Miss Nomad Foodie asked for a cheetah-print inside the cake, with vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry-flavored cakes, so I made an attempt using my go-to yellow birthday cake recipe, Smitten Kitchen's Best Birthday Cake. I find this cake consistently turns out as described: moist, plush, with a fine, dense crumb, and buttery flavor. I did reduce the sugar by 10%, to 360 grams. For the strawberry portion, I took about a third of the batter and added 1 teaspoon of strawberry flavor and about 15 grams of ground freeze-dried strawberries (I ground Trader Joe's freeze-dried strawberries in a coffee bean grinder). For the chocolate portion, I added about 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder to the battery.
I thought the easiest way to create the print inside would be to use a bundt cake pan. Miss Nomad Foodie insisted on "strawberry, strawberry is my favorite" frosting, so I started with Celebrating Sweet's Cream Cheese Frosting recipe, since I wanted something more liquid than my usual cream cheese frosting but more substantial than a glaze. The proportions of ingredients were:
113g cream cheese at room temperature
200g powdered sugar sifted with
30g ground freeze-dried strawberries
2 Tablespoons milk
1/4 teaspoon strawberry flavor
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
I supposed I could've added more milk to make the frosting flow and drip more attractively over the cake, but it was fine for our purposes, and it had an intensely strawberry flavor.
The kids decorated the cake with Trader Joe's Candy Coated Chocolate Drops, which are like a slightly more natural version of M&Ms.
I thought the easiest way to create the print inside would be to use a bundt cake pan. Miss Nomad Foodie insisted on "strawberry, strawberry is my favorite" frosting, so I started with Celebrating Sweet's Cream Cheese Frosting recipe, since I wanted something more liquid than my usual cream cheese frosting but more substantial than a glaze. The proportions of ingredients were:
113g cream cheese at room temperature
200g powdered sugar sifted with
30g ground freeze-dried strawberries
2 Tablespoons milk
1/4 teaspoon strawberry flavor
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
I supposed I could've added more milk to make the frosting flow and drip more attractively over the cake, but it was fine for our purposes, and it had an intensely strawberry flavor.
The kids decorated the cake with Trader Joe's Candy Coated Chocolate Drops, which are like a slightly more natural version of M&Ms.
How did the cake turn out? Well the flavor and texture was great, but alas, the pattern inside was more of a marbled-swirl than a cheetah-print. Nonetheless, we had a happy little girl!
