temptation in strawberry & chocolate

I firmly stand behind the idea - if it's a birthday without a cake, it's not a proper birthday! Following my life principle, I decided to prepare a little surprise for the birthday of one of my room mates :)

This is the perfect celebration cake - it has it all, rich taste, colours, fresh strawberries :) and is the first one of the series of spring delights I hope I will be preparing in the upcoming months...

without much further ado, let me present you... THE strawberry chocolate cake:

the final cake is very smiley and reminds me of the rays of the strawberry sun. Before we get to it though, there are several steps in the preparation process...

Ingredients

for the cake layers (from Sunshine's Kitchen)

180g sifted flour

150g sugar

125g cane sugar

60g cocoa

1 1/4 tsp baking soda

1 1/4 tsp baking powder

2 medium eggs

100g yoghurt + 25ml water

75 ml sunflower oil

140 ml hot coffee

The dry ingredients (flour, both types of sugar, cocoa, baking soda and powder) are mixed well in a dry bowl and are set aside. In another bowl we mix the eggs, oil and yoghurt+water. Then these are added to the big bowl. Finally the hot coffee is added and we blend all of this together in a smooth and fluffy mixture (it reminds me the consistency of a brownie). The mixture is poured into a baking ring (mine is 24cm) and baked in a 180C pre-heated oven for 35 minutes (or a little bit more until fully baked)...

after baking the layers-to-be are hot for quite some time, so we wait until they are cooled down at least a bit (I was quite impatient to try my new tool) and we can cut the layers, which was a biiig challenge for me - from Ikea I bought this handy cake cutter, but I still had to help myself with a knife and finally managed to produce two decent cake layers (if your baking ring is smaller you might be able to cut in 3 layers)

next step: the strawberry filling:

for the cream and decoration:

500g mascarpone

1 pack (20g) vanilla sugar

100g strawberry jam

50 ml milk

500g fresh strawberries

very easy, breezy we whisk the mascarpone, milk, jam and vanilla sugar together until we have a nice pinky smooth cream; portion of the cream is evenly distributed over the first chocolate layer and topped with a layer of strawberry pieces. The second layer is put on top. The whole cake is covered with the rest of the cream and the decoration starts...

my decoration consisted of strawberry quarters in the form of the spring red strawberry sun, chocolate shavings in between and chocolate buttons on the side :) for some strange reasons my cupboard has eaten my slivered almonds, which I wanted to use, oh well.. I have to have a serious talk with that cupboard :P

Hope you enjoy, spring is coming, make a cake!!! :)