Cupid's Strawberry Cake with Cream Cheese Buttercream

This is a very festive cake which I made for our Canada Day celebration, using the author’s signature yellow butter cake (page 348), cream cheese buttercream and beautiful, local strawberries.

This review is for the buttercream and finished cake only as the cake portion was reviewed separately.

The frosting starts as a classic French buttercream made with egg yolks, hot sugar syrup and butter. In this recipe, part of the butter is replaced with cream cheese. The addition of gelatin (I used agar agar) and powdered sugar should have been a warning to me that this was going to be a soft frosting that needed stabilizers to help it set. And it was…. so soft it was almost pourable at 70F. I could work with it chilled to 60F but it was difficult to maintain this temperature as my kitchen was 70F with the help of air conditioning.

The cakes were split horizontally and 2 layers spread with red currant jelly. A layer of buttercream and fresh strawberries filled the centre of the cake. The flavour was quite nice but you can’t really go wrong with juicy, summer berries and vanilla cake and the cream cheese buttercream complemented the fruit beautifully.

Overall, the cake was a huge success but I won’t ever make that buttercream again …….