how I made a strawberry puree cake
notes for the future because this worked.
I believe I started with a pound and a half of berries that I froze because Andrew Marvell thought it would be a nice serene joke to pelt me with Way Too Many Strawberries In Winter. I decided they must be used right now because it's about to be Crazy Fruit Season. So this is what I did.
First I researched strawberry cake online. Oh dear. I never saw so many recipes for cake mix and jello. There's even a school of recipes that are variously called "cake" or "salad" which involve a crust of crushed pretzels, followed by a layer of cream cheese and "whipped topping" and then a layer of frozen strawberries in strawberry jello. My brain broke to see it called "salad."
So then I found a series of pages where the recipe was based on an adaptation of Hummingbird Cake which involves a mountain of sugar and self-rising flour. I do not understand the point of self-rising flour, and I do know this can be substituted for, but I didn't care to do it. After seeing many other recipes involving mountains of sugar I figured that these people must be using the sugar to sop up the juice of the strawberries and to hell with them. I thought about adapting applesauce cake, but in the event I couldn't find an applesauce cake recipe that wasn't meant to be heavy and spicy and filled with nuts (made me think how much I like applesauce cake, though).
I was about to do it anyway and then I had a flash and searched "berry cake" and found this "purple cupcake" recipe. I didn't make that though. I let it convince me that just using my base knowledge of how cakes are made would work.
I did read on a blog of a person who is apparently a guru of fancy-dancy pro-style baking that adding fruit puree to a cake disastrously alters the pH and ruins the cake, and that made me think "aha! that's why banana cake and many applesauce cakes have baking soda and baking powder in them."
This is what I ended up doing:
Put that pound and a half of unsweetened whole frozen strawberries into a pot and let them thaw. They will look terrible. Cook them gently in their own juices until they are completely mushy. Rub them through a sieve and get as much pulp as you can before you get annoyed and toss the rest. Cook it down at low heat for a bit until it is almost as thick as runny jam. Do not add anything to it at this point. You will have about one and three-quarters cup of puree. It will be a muted dark rose color, kind of quietly pretty, not brilliant like jam.
Cream 1/2-pound butter and 1 cup sugar, mix in 2 eggs.
Mix two and a half cups of flour (I accidentally bought that stupid white whole-wheat flour and I forgot to make it half and half almond, but it's pretty nice anyway) with a half tablespoon of baking powder and a half tablespoon of baking soda.
Add a teaspoon of vanilla and a teaspoon of almond extract to the strawberry puree. You could add a bit of lemon or orange juice or orange flower water too, but I didn't. Other common cake spices like cinnamon or cardamom might be nice too.
Alternate adding the flour and puree to the batter.
It fit into a buttered 9 inch by 12 inch pan and I cooked it at 350 degrees for about an hour, It tastes very nice, not too sweet: and it really tastes like berries. And smells like berries too! It is just barely pink. Also, I used half the sugar that most of the recipes called for.
I have whipping cream and fresh strawberries. So I am going to macerate a few berries in sugar and use the resulting red goo to tint some whipped cream. Then I will make plate piles of pink cake, pink cream, and strawberries.
So there, people who think "strawberry cake" means box mix and jello, or people who think that strawberries are too acid to bake with.
I think it would be amusing to make this cake in batches: a strawberry batch, a blueberry batch, and an apricot batch. And make them in thinnish layers, and put different colors of jam or cream between them and pile mixed fruit on the plate with them.
I believe I started with a pound and a half of berries that I froze because Andrew Marvell thought it would be a nice serene joke to pelt me with Way Too Many Strawberries In Winter. I decided they must be used right now because it's about to be Crazy Fruit Season. So this is what I did.
First I researched strawberry cake online. Oh dear. I never saw so many recipes for cake mix and jello. There's even a school of recipes that are variously called "cake" or "salad" which involve a crust of crushed pretzels, followed by a layer of cream cheese and "whipped topping" and then a layer of frozen strawberries in strawberry jello. My brain broke to see it called "salad."
So then I found a series of pages where the recipe was based on an adaptation of Hummingbird Cake which involves a mountain of sugar and self-rising flour. I do not understand the point of self-rising flour, and I do know this can be substituted for, but I didn't care to do it. After seeing many other recipes involving mountains of sugar I figured that these people must be using the sugar to sop up the juice of the strawberries and to hell with them. I thought about adapting applesauce cake, but in the event I couldn't find an applesauce cake recipe that wasn't meant to be heavy and spicy and filled with nuts (made me think how much I like applesauce cake, though).
I was about to do it anyway and then I had a flash and searched "berry cake" and found this "purple cupcake" recipe. I didn't make that though. I let it convince me that just using my base knowledge of how cakes are made would work.
I did read on a blog of a person who is apparently a guru of fancy-dancy pro-style baking that adding fruit puree to a cake disastrously alters the pH and ruins the cake, and that made me think "aha! that's why banana cake and many applesauce cakes have baking soda and baking powder in them."
This is what I ended up doing:
Put that pound and a half of unsweetened whole frozen strawberries into a pot and let them thaw. They will look terrible. Cook them gently in their own juices until they are completely mushy. Rub them through a sieve and get as much pulp as you can before you get annoyed and toss the rest. Cook it down at low heat for a bit until it is almost as thick as runny jam. Do not add anything to it at this point. You will have about one and three-quarters cup of puree. It will be a muted dark rose color, kind of quietly pretty, not brilliant like jam.
Cream 1/2-pound butter and 1 cup sugar, mix in 2 eggs.
Mix two and a half cups of flour (I accidentally bought that stupid white whole-wheat flour and I forgot to make it half and half almond, but it's pretty nice anyway) with a half tablespoon of baking powder and a half tablespoon of baking soda.
Add a teaspoon of vanilla and a teaspoon of almond extract to the strawberry puree. You could add a bit of lemon or orange juice or orange flower water too, but I didn't. Other common cake spices like cinnamon or cardamom might be nice too.
Alternate adding the flour and puree to the batter.
It fit into a buttered 9 inch by 12 inch pan and I cooked it at 350 degrees for about an hour, It tastes very nice, not too sweet: and it really tastes like berries. And smells like berries too! It is just barely pink. Also, I used half the sugar that most of the recipes called for.
I have whipping cream and fresh strawberries. So I am going to macerate a few berries in sugar and use the resulting red goo to tint some whipped cream. Then I will make plate piles of pink cake, pink cream, and strawberries.
So there, people who think "strawberry cake" means box mix and jello, or people who think that strawberries are too acid to bake with.
I think it would be amusing to make this cake in batches: a strawberry batch, a blueberry batch, and an apricot batch. And make them in thinnish layers, and put different colors of jam or cream between them and pile mixed fruit on the plate with them.