Pink cake recipe review – allllll the strawberry

Continuing the cookbook completion with reviews. We had friends over whose daughter is super hard in her princess phase, so it had to be pink cake for dinner (she was suitably impressed)

Grandpa’s candles Four. Everyone loved it.

Tool rating Copper/Gold. Nothing here much harder than any fancy cake, but grinding the freeze dried strawberries was a bit of pain

Ok first things first – I didn’t get duck eggs. I found a place to get them and was planning a little field trip to a farm to get some. And then it was a billion degrees that week and I couldn’t do it. I used extra large chicken eggs instead.

This cake is a very dense, very buttery cake. It gets close to pound cake territory for density. The yellow cake base would be a great base for lots of different cakes. It doesn’t rise very much. In fact, I made the crumb twice because I thought I messed something up. Nope. Just a very dense cake.

The strawberry watermelon jam filling is easy to make and tasty. We tasted it prior to filling the cake with it and teen described it as “watermelon jolly rancher” and I can’t improve on that. Once it was in the cake and chilled (overnight for me) a lot of the watermelon flavor was gone and it was mostly strawberry.

The texture of the icing is a bit unusual. It’s a cream cheese/butter, which isn’t as fussy as some kinds but you do have to keep it from getting too warm (it was 97 degrees and thunder storming when I decorated the cake which is why the border is sliiiiiding down the front on mine lol). If it’s hard to work with, give it a quick chill. And if the kitchen is warm, chill the decorating bag (last step) a little longer than recommended.

The ground freeze dried strawberries give a very pretty pink color and a distinct strawberry flavor, but they did make the icing a little gummy. I noticed this especially with the leftovers (chilled two days). It also had a tendency to clump in the grinder, although that may have been the temp and humidity I was dealing with.

I’m not usually a big fan of fruit with cake but the flavor of this one is good. Mostly strawberry with very little melon. Once chilled it settles to a nice density.

Tips: this is a great example of dry/wet ingredient adding to get a good texture of your crumb (all the desserts I’ve made from the book so far are) so this recipe is actually a good place to start as a beginner. The technique for building the batter is good. Follow the steps exactly. Good cakes don’t come from just dumping all the ingredients in at once. Sifting (which she recommends) makes a big difference

You don’t need very much watermelon. You could use a mini watermelon and probably have some leftover.

Not much else in the way of tips other than the temperature stuff I already mentioned.

Have fun! 🙂