The Strawberry Shortcake(s) Experiment

I know I'm several days later than I said I would be with this post. But hopefully you weren't waiting on pins and needles or anything.

I'm finally going to tell you how J's birthday cake came out.

He requested strawberry shortcake. I've never made strawberry shortcake, so I went to Pinterest to see what I could dig up as far as recipes were concerned. I found this recipe, which isn't a traditional shortcake recipe, but it sounded good and relatively simple.

I had to make a few major adaptations to the recipe.

First, I decided to make cupcakes instead of one large cake. This is mostly because I only have big, rectangular cake pans. But it's also because my grandma recently gave me a set of silicon baking cups. I was dying to try them, and J's birthday was a great excuse.

So I made the cake batter according to the recipe. ...I thought. As it turns out I'm not a whiz at figuring out metric to English conversion and I don't have a scale. I'm relatively sure I put in too much sugar.

No harm done, the cake is a little sticky, but other than that, no problem.

I've never beaten eggs as long as I had to beat this batter. (That may be because of the sugar.) I'm so glad I used my stand mixer, because I thought briefly about doing it by hand. I don't know how long I beat them but it felt like at least 10 minutes.

Finally the batter was mixed and ready to go.

I wanted to make 23 cupcakes and place a candle on each one and I had 24 cups, perfect! However, I wanted to make each cake in 2 layers, and I didn't know if I would be able to split them nicely after they baked.

So I put about half the batter into 23 cups and baked them.

The bad part of all this was that I had to let the batter just sit there while I baked them, they cooled and I emptied and washed the cups.

You can see how the sticky cake stuck to the sides. 

 So the moral of the story is that the first set of cakes is much, much fluffier than the second.

While the second set was baking, I made the filling. I can never find Mascarpone cheese in a grocery store, so I subbed in cream cheese. I also left out the alcohol.

By the time the filling was made, it was down to the wire of J's arrival. So I pulled the other batch out of the oven and started assembling the first batch.

I placed one layer of cake upside down on the platter, then a dollop of filling, a couple of strawberry slices, and then they other cake. I put some filling on top and a decoratively placed a couple more slices of strawberry.

I made 11 cakes out of the first batch, stuck two candles in each and one candle in the odd cake out. (Why I didn't make 24 cups the first time around I have no idea.)

Happy birthday, J!

As you can see, it was a mess. The cake stuck to everything, and I was so rushed that I didn't even think about setting up a nice, clutter-free picture. 

But they tasted great! We've been enjoying them ever since. 

Maybe next year, I'll finally manage the perfect birthday cake.