Strawberry Cake

My paternal family is somewhat of a mess. There were 4 boys and a girl in the family and not many of my cousins or myself were raised by our parents on that side of the family be they our father or mother. We had wonderful great-grandparents that worked really hard at creating a family environment for us but they were both gone by the time I was 19 and many of my cousins were very young or not even born before then. 

I have been thinking about my great-grandmother a lot lately and missing her...her name was Zola and she would be very sad about the state of this family. I have kicked up my efforts to try to re-connect with my cousins and create a family for our children in the past months. Many of my cousins are interested in this for themselves and/or their children.

One of my cousin's children was turing 13 on the 13th of this month and it seemed like an ideal opportunity to get together. I am hoping these get togethers grow in number of family members that come! 

I, of course, wanted to do an awesome cake. I wish I had been doing this when Hannah turned 13 or even MacKenzie. I started all these "roses" cakes because I have been planning this cake for months! I needed to see if I could do it at all...these roses are seriously easy!

I have to confess, I did even a worse job of picture taking (none during the process) because my 19 month old nephew was keeping me company and I was a bit nervous about this icing...I was distracted!

I wanted to make this strawberry cake so bad and had been planning it...the recipe calls for strawberry puree and I have strawberries that I put in the freezer at the end of the summer, this is the perfect use for them!

I realized when I pulled up the recipe on my ZipList and had been debating what icing to use. I am chomping at the bit to do a chocolate cake with chocolate icing so I wondered about chocolate icing on this but was afraid that it would overpower the strawberry in the cake. So I decided on a strawberry swiss meringue buttercream recipe that I had found.

Strawberry Birthday Cake with Strawberry Swiss Meringue Butter Cream Icing

This cake was AMAZING! I also forgot to take a picture of the inside. I used 8 inch pans and made it three layer. I used my icing bag to pipe the icing between layers. I used white chocolate melting candy to make the "M."

What I will do differently next time: The icing was wonderful but a bit too buttery for me (no wonder with the amount of butter in it) I think that I will do half light cream cheese and half butter and see how that goes. 

It turned out beautiful! I think this was my best cake yet!