Jim's Birthday Cake Part Un

Spring seems to be bringing the season of cakes along with it. After baking a wonderful three layer Fruit Basket Cake last weekend, today I set out to bake half of Jim's birthday cake. Half? Why half? If you go back to Sunday's recipe and look very closely, you will see that the first few pictures in the photo were taken in broad daylight. The rest of the pictures are white out, flash on, nighttime photos. So I got smarter. Technically Jim's birthday is tomorrow, I've decided to bake him a beautiful two-layer strawberry yellow cake, filled with, more strawberries!

My number one mistake on Sunday was I attempted to do everything in one day and I spent half the day waiting for the darn cakes to cool! So in order to actually bake my husband an amazing birthday cake I decided I would get the "baking" part over with today. This yellow cake recipe is inspired directly from the yellow cake recipe in the Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. The strawberry part is actually my own fun little twist. Happy baking!

Two 9 in. Cakes

First, you will need 6 room temperature large eggs.

Separate six yolks into one medium sized mixing bowl.

Add in 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract.

And 1/4 cup of milk.

Beat together lightly to combine, and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, add in 3 cups of sifted cake flour.

Add in 1 1/2 cups of sugar, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon of baking powder and stir with a wire whisk to combine.

Cut 12 tablespoons of room temperature butter into small pieces. 

Add the butter and 3/4 cup of milk to the dry ingredients and beat with a mixer on medium speed about 2 minutes.

The mixture will look doughy and crumbly.

Add in the egg mixture in three parts, beating well after each addition.

Ta-Dah! If you don't want to add the strawberries to the batter, you can split up the batter now and bake.

Butter and flour two 9 inch round cake pans, line both with a parchment circle than butter and flour the parchment. Set prepared pans aside.

Place 1/2 a cup of strawberries in a food processor and pulse to finely chop.

Make sure to not over pulse the strawberries, you do not want them to puree.

Fold the strawberries into the batter well.

Hello beautiful!

Bake in an oven at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or when an inserted cake tester comes out clean.

Cool cakes completely overnight. 

Check back tomorrow to check out the finished product! Stay tuned...