Strawberry Cinnamon Birthday Cake

I am post nights, so my sweet tooth is appearing! That kind of thing tends to happen when you've been awake for 24 hours. Restraint becomes.. difficult and cake becomes ambrosia!

My boyfriend is very patient. I was really sick during his birthday. Really, really sick. So the cake that I had planned carefully to make him didn’t happen. And he got no cake on his birthday at all. It’s pretty much the worst case of me dropping the ball.

But this story has a happy ending.. One week later, I was all better, and there was cake!

So, I could make the cake I’d been planning. My boyfriend loves fruity cakes, and my strawberry crumble is his absolute fave. But it is FAR too hot for crumble. Since summer is a cake season, I decided to reprise an old favourite- the strawberry rosette cake, giving it a twist from my crumble flavours. I added a little twist of cinnamon, some ground almonds, and played around with the decoration. I really love decorating cakes, but I’m working on it. I wanted to do like a cascade of roses, and little mini rosettes, but it wasn’t the effect I quite wanted. Maybe I should have added glitter. Glitter always helps.

Ingredients for the sponge

• 150g butter
• 150g caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 100g flour
• 50g ground almonds
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tbsp milk

Ingredients for the icing & filling

• 150g butter
• 500g icing sugar
• 4 strawberries, sliced
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• 2 tbsp strawberry jam
• Few drops red food colouring

Method

Begin with the cake. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees and grease and line 2 cake tins. Cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs one at a time with a tbsp. of flour and mix well. Add in the rest of the flour, ground almonds, baking powder and cinnamon and mix well. Add milk until you get a soft, dropping consistency.

Bake in the oven for 20 minutes.

Remove, get on a wire cooling rack and allow to cool completely.

Now, make the icing. Cream the butter, and mix in the icing sugar 1/3 at a time. Slice up the strawbs, and sieve half of them (the ugliest half), letting the strawberry juice drip into the icing mix. Mix well and set aside

Spread jam onto half the cooled cake, and scatter the sliced strawberries on top. Spread a thin layer of the buttercream on the other half.

Now, divide the buttercream roughly into 1/3 and 2/3. From the larger batch of buttercream, ice the entire cake. With the smaller bowl of buttercream, add in a few drops of food colouring to give you a stronger pink colour.

Divide up into two piping bags, one with a large nozzle and one with a smaller one.

Pipe some scattered large rosettes, and fill in any gaps with the smaller roses.

Refrigerate until ready to eat. Slice up and enjoy!