White, Red and Chocolate

White, red and chocolate. Interesting title? White and red refers to the strawberry shortcake and chocolate refers to the chocolate cake. Simple and direct. No fanciful name. Baked these 2 cakes for a friend's 3 yr-old niece's birthday. My friend has a big family - 7 sisters and 1 brother if I remember correctly. The strawberry shortcake is for the birthday girl and the chocolate cake is for the rest of her nieces and nephews. She's a very good aunt. She just wants to make sure everyone has enough to eat. So nice of her.

This strawberry shortcake is a little unusual. I baked a chocolate chiffon cake base instead of the vanilla sponge cake. A layer of orange zest flavoured fresh cream sits between the 2 layers of chocolate chiffon, with lots of strawberry slices in it. The cake is then dressed up beautifully with luscious fresh cream and more strawberries. Why this combination? You see, she actually wanted the chocolate cake with orange swiss meringue butter cream that I've baked earlier. But she doesn't want buttercream - too fattening (80% butter fat vs 34% fat in fresh cream) I guess. Haha ... Next, birthday girl likes strawberries and blueberries and everything pink. So as to incorporate her favourites and the orange flavour cream, this cake is born. I have to tell you that orange-flavoured fresh cream is so yummy. I'm going to bake a cake covered with this frosting next time. Stay tuned.

The other cake is a simple chocolate cake with blackforest cherries soaked in brandy sandwiched between 2 layers of chocolate genoise sponge. Simple, light and chocolatey.

I'm just going to share the recipe for the orange flavour fresh cream frosting here. The rest of the recipes can be found in my blog somewhere.

Orange Fresh Cream Frosting

Ingredients:
174g heavy cream
10g powdered sugar
3/4 + 1/8 tsp gelatin powder
30g fresh orange juice
1/2 tbsp orange zest

Method:

1. Add the gelatin powder, powdered sugar, 43g of heavy cream and orange juice into a saucepan.
2. Bring the mixture to just a boil, stirring constantly. It will thicken slightly.
3. Scrape the mixture into a small bowl to cool to room temperature.
4. In a chilled mixing bowl, whip the remaining cream just until traces of the beater marks begin to show. Add the cooled gelatin mixture in a steady stream, beating constantly. Add the orange zest. Whip just until stiff peaks form when the beater is raised.

Note: Enough to fill 1 layer of 10" square cake.