Fresh Strawberry Cake & Scones

I don't know what happened to me yesterday, but around 1:23 PM I was hit with a sudden NEED (definitely not just a craving) for strawberry cake. Now- I'm not talking about vanilla cake with fresh strawberries, or strawberry shortcake, or anything like that. I'm talking about straight up- layered strawberry flavored cake with buttercream and lots of things that are bad for me.

The weird thing- is that I've never actually had strawberry cake before. I just felt liked I needed it, for whatever reason. It was beyond me.

I ended up having to do some searching. Almost every single recipe I found called for either boxed cake mix (sin!) or strawberry Jell-O (ew!) NOT HAPPENING IN THIS KITCHEN. Sorry kittens. I finally landed on this glorious, wonderful recipe, that was exactly what I was looking for.

Now. Call me crazy- but I really, really do not care for cream cheese frosting one bit. I made my bosses daughter a pound cake with Toffuti cream cheese frosting last summer, and that was the closest I came to liking it. And that most likely had something to do with the half pound of strawberries that I had added to it. Just saying.

I have the tendency to try to make every "bad" for me thing that I ever bake relatively healthy. This goes beyond just veganizing recipes. I sub out white flour for whole wheat, I use applesauce instead of oil, nuts instead of chocolate... blah blah the list goes on. Yesterday was not the day for that nonsense. Plus I wanted other people to actually eat it.

So, out with cream cheese frosting- and in with whiskey buttercream. Yes, really. First of all- this is my all-time favorite frosting recipe. Second of all- I'm out of vanilla and too broke/cheap to replace it right now- but LUCKILY for some reason I have a plethora of mini-bottles of cheap whiskey in my cupboards. I'm not sure how it all got there, but I sure am glad that it did. It was an easy substitution to make (I did it in the cake too, shhh!) and OMFG am I glad that I did.

In all of the moving that I've done in the past year and a half, I managed to misplace my cake pans. All I had was a 9"x11" pyrex, so once my cake had cooled (and I freaking burnt half of it because my oven is the devil), I cut it in half, and then layered it that way. Oh, sweet, sweet heaven.



I was planning on posting both recipes, with my modifications- but really, I don't need to. If you need the cake to be vegan- just sub the eggs out for silken tofu (or whatever your egg sub preference is- although with the number of eggs being so high, I would definitely suggest tofu over flax meal or Ener-G) I made the cake using eggs (the first non-vegan thing I've baked in over a year, whoaaa), and really all I did was sub the vanilla for whiskey in both recipes, which isn't required, but is still a very wise choice. Just try it. Do it. Come on.

Oh yeah, and after that was done I made strawberry scones because I had leftover puree. And no, mine weren't whole wheat, and yes, they were vegan. Matt has been living off of them for the past 24 hours. That and cake. I want him to get fat.



(Yes the scones had purple and pink turbinado sugar on them. What?)

And my real dinner- because my body was going to kick me out of it if I didn't feed it something that wasn't made out of 95% sugar- was wilted dandelion greens with garlic, balsamic, and sea salt. Pretty damn delicious, minus the fact that my greens were too mature and a bit too bitter for my taste. Oh well. Back to the sugar.



Sorry about the crap pictures. The lighting in my apartment gets all sorts of crazy once the sun goes down.