Strawberry and champagne layer cake for the 1st year of blogging!

A year ago I created this blog and I embarked on a beautiful journey. Though my passion for food was great to start with, but during this year, the passion grew along my skills and techniques. I learned a lot from all the comments and reviews and continue to learn from everyone who share my love and passion for food, especially sweets.

The spirit of sharing recipes with people across the world is hard to describe; it is overwhelming. It fills my heart with joy. I got inspired, developed and created recipes throughout this year, playing with ingredients I am used to and love and even some new ones. Hopefully, the coming year will be just as rewarding as this year has been.  

To celebrate my first year of blogging, I thought of a recipe worthy of the occasion. I decided to use champagne as it is the drink of choice in celebrations, complemented by strawberries.
Keeping with the celebration theme, the cakes I made were colorful, joyful and reflect the colors of the main flavoring ingredients (champagne and strawberries) which were also use to flavor the decadent butter cream cake frosting.

So to make the cake you will need to do the following:

For the cake (4 x 13 cm pan or 5 inches)

• 2 large eggs, room temperature
• 200 g sugar
• 200 g sifted flour
• 90 g melted butter
• Tsp and a half of baking powder
•  A dash of salt
• 70 g of strawberry and champagne syrup (recipe follows)
• 1 tsp vanilla

Combine flour, salt and baking powder and set aside. Cream eggs and sugar, until they become a whitish fluffy batter, and when you drop some batter on the surface it will hold few seconds before sinking. Add the vanilla, then the butter and whisk again until well combined.

Turn off the mixer and with a spatula start combining the flour mixture. Add it in two batches. When combined add the syrup.

Pour the batter into 4 pans, pre-greased and lined with parchment or wax paper, or in 2 batches if you don´t have 4 pans of the same size. Keep the rest of the batter in the fridge while you bake the first batch.

If you want to color your batter just add a drop of food coloring, fill in the first pan, than add another drop of food coloring, and fill the second pan with batter and so on until you fill the four pans. This will you will have a difference in the color intensity or color gradients.

Bake in a preheated oven (180C) for about 20 minutes.

Let the cake cool for 5 min in the pan then remove and put on a cake wire to cool completely.

For the syrup:

• 75 g strawberry puree
• 75 g champagne
• tbsp vanilla sugar or you can use half vanilla bean and a tbsp sugar

Combine all ingredients and let it simmer for about 10 min. When done, you can process it to get a smoother syrup.

For the butter cream you need:

• 75 g water
• 180 g sugar
• 75 g egg whites, at room temperature
• 270 g butter, at room temperature

Combine sugar and water, put it on medium high heat, at the same time start whisking the whites at medium speed. When the syrup reaches 120 C then it´s ready to be poured over the foamy and doubled in size egg whites. If you don´t have a thermometer, you need to watch when the syrup forms big and uniform bubbles on the surface, or if you are very courageous you can put your fingers in ice cold water, then dip it in the syrup quickly and then cool it back in the cold water. If the syrup ball forms threads when pulled apart then it's ready. I honestly recommend you make a small investment and buy a thermometer.

Slowly pour the syrup over the egg white, and increase the speed of the mixer, and keep whisking until the white is very creamy and shiny, when the sides of the bowl are rather warm start adding the butter piece by piece while the mixer is still on and on high speed, when the butter is well combined you can add a tsp of vanilla essence or 2 tsp of champagne!

cake assembling:

Brush each layer with the remaining syrup, then spread some of the butter cream on the first layer, add the second layer and repeat until you have all the layers. I also added freshly sliced strawberries between each layer.
Frost the cakes with an outer layer of butter cream. At this stage, chill the cake for 30 min in the fridge. Than add another layer of butter cream. Chill and then add the final layer. At this stage, you can play with the color shades and intensity, or you can decorate according to your desires and used geometric or free form motifs, the choice is yours.

I finished the decoration with macarons, that I had painted and filled with the same buttercream!

Though the cake was not the easiest one I made, in fact it was time consuming, but I can guarantee that it was absolutely worth the effort.

A big thank you for all the people who visited the blog, shared the recipes and tried some, so grateful, hope you keep on visiting and liking what I do!

Unfortunately the pics don´t show how cute the cake was, I took them late in the evening and was hard getting a good shot, but what was important that it tasted real good, and I hope you do try the recipe!