Strawberry cake

Growing up, my absolute favorite cakes were either the ice cream cake from Carvel (the one with the chocolate crunchies) or this strawberry cake from a Chinese bake shop. It was the only bake shop I ever found that made my favorite strawberry cake. It was light and pink and tasted richly of sweet, sweet strawberries. Yum!

So lately, in a fit of nostalgia, I was craving some strawberry cake. Maybe it was because I saw a strawberry cake mix in the supermarket that the craving began. The beautiful pink, yummy texture beckoned me to buy the mix. Well, I haven't made a cake from a mix in a loooong time and I wasn't about to start now either! Looking online for "strawberry cake" yielded lots of results of people mixing white cake mix with strawberry gelatin mix, which is definitely not what I wanted. Then I found a forum where someone posted a strawberry cake recipe from Whole Foods. You can see the recipe here:
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/recipe.php?recipeId=732

At the time, the supermarket near me didn't have any fresh or frozen strawberries, so I decided to use strawberry preserves. I left out the sugar in the recipe and added some lemon zest. It actually turned out quite well, though unfortunately we finished the cake before I remembered to take and post pictures. As much as I liked the cake, it didn't really satisfy my nostalgic craving.

So in the next attempt, I was able to procure some frozen strawberries, which were delicious and very sweet on their own. This time, however, I was missing lemon zest, but I made it anyways. This cake turned out very nicely too, but I felt it didn't taste of strawberries enough. While polishing off the last of this second attempt before remembering to take photos again, I realized that it wasn't just any cake I wanted. I really wanted to make more of a sponge cake!

So the next attempt will require much more work. First, I'm actually going to make strawberry gelatin. I have some agar agar packages I bought from an asian supermarket so I'm not using any non-vegetarian gelatin. A nice strawberry gelatin recipe is offered from Martha Stewart. Then, I'm going to incorporate the gelatin into a light cake recipe. For the cake recipe, I'll be using cake flour and I'll be separating the eggs, so I can beat them fluffy. I may just use the egg whites and freeze the yolks for something else (yes, you can freeze yolks! Just pop them and add some salt to keep them from getting lumpy). The idea is to get lots of air into the batter. Cake flour is lighter, and more fine than regular flour, so it will create lighter texture. I haven't worked out all the details of how I'm going to meld the two components, but as you can see, I'm sort of trying to duplicate the gelatin-cake mix recipe.

Anyways, I won't be able make another attempt until the local supermarket stocks frozen strawberries again, which doesn't happen all that often. :-( Ah well. Another project on the To Do Someday bin!