Saturday, April 3, 2010

Heavenly White Cake


Yes yes so I know it's been forever since I've posted. I have continued to cook and bake but have been kinda busy in the last few months and haven't updated. A quick personal update I'm now pregnant and moved into a new place about 2 months ago. My mom is moving to Missouri to be near me and her first grandchild. In fact she is temporarily going to be moving in with the boyfriend and I and staying in the baby's room while she finds a job and a place of her own. I told her she had till August then I'd have to kick her out. (Can you guess what month I'm due?)

Anyway onto the food. :D All said and done this cake doesn't really deserve to be on a blog called the ugly dumpling because truth be known it came out BEAUTIFUL. But I'll post it here cause I don't have another food blog anyway.

So this recipe was ganked from Allrecipes.com I was over visiting a friend and we decided we wanted to bake something so we went searching. I had seen a pic of a white fruit filled cake when I was going through one of my cookbooks and so that's what was on my mind. We decided on a simple white cake and then would add some strawberry something in the middle.

The cake recipe is pretty simple
2 3/4c cake flour
4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
4 egg whites
1 1/2c sugar
3/4 c butter
1 1/2 c milk (if you look at the one on the actual website it only calls for a cup however per many reviews we opted to try with the extra milk and feel it worked well. Since we've not make the cake w/o the extra half cup we can not comment on if it NEEDS it or not but we liked it)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract



You start by sifting the dry ingredients together (again the actual recipe calls to sift 3 times, we did not, we are lazy we sifted once.) Once sifted set aside. In a large bowl beat your egg whites till stiff then add in half a cup of your sugar. Your remaining sugar will be used in a moment. Beat together the whites and sugar till you can achieve soft peaks and set aside.

Cream your butter then add in the remaining cup of sugar till light and fluffy. Then alternate adding your dry ingredients and your remaining milk into the butter/sugar mixture. Beat each addition till smooth. Then stir in your vanilla and almond extracts. Once blended well mix into your meringue and beat thoroughly.


Separate into your cake pans (we used 3 8" you can do that or 2 9" or a 15"x10" square. Bake in your oven at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes. Once complete transfer to cooling rack for 10 or more min before icing especially if you intend to use whip cream as it will melt the cool whip if the cake is too warm.
Now for ours we layered the cake with strawberry preserves then put on your whipped cream. For the whipped cream we simply used one pint of heavy cream, 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar and aprox 1 tsp of vanilla. On top of the whipped cream we placed sliced strawberries.
On the first layer I accidentally put the sliced strawberries on top of the preserves before I put the whipped cream. Before we got it in the fridge it slid a little on the layer I did the strawberries next to the preserves. On the next layer I did preserves, whipped cream, then the sliced strawberries and that one stayed put where it was supposed to.

After we layered the cake we put it in the fridge for about 20 minutes. Wasn't really needed but decided to do it anyway just so the whipped cream set up well in the layers. After the cake set up and we did the next batch of whipped cream (in which we added 3 tablespoons of the powdered sugar because we wanted the actual icing to be a bit sweeter) we layered strawberries on top to finish off what we had. We put the entire cake in the fridge for about 30 minutes to let the whole thing set up. Then we dug in and wow was it great. Not to sweet. Very moist. Very good. All in all a great cake to take to your 4th of July get together or any kind of summer bbq for that matter. You will want some place cool to keep it though if you do decide to do a whipped cream frosting because in the heat it will melt.