(food) strawberry cake
Hello, class! Welcome to today’s lesson baking on a strawberry cake. Specifically, this strawberry cake from the queen of crafts and insider trading herself, Martha Stewart.
Without further ado, let’s get started….
Lesson 1: If you see four pounds of strawberries on sale for $6, you should buy them. That is a great deal for strawberries. You might then find yourself wondering what will one woman do with four pounds of strawberries. That is a great question, and the answer is that you shall bake a strawberry cake. But before you embark on this venture to bake a strawberry cake from scratch which you have never done before, it is wise to locate a recipe either before or while you are at the store also purchasing the strawberries. This will result in fewer trips to pick up eggs, then crap we’re out of butter, and omg are you kidding me we don’t have enough flour. gawd!
Lesson 2: If you share your house with a person who never ever ever in a million years has or would ever bake anything like a strawberry cake but is so sweet to do the dishes without asking and puts stuff away not even where they go, you should probably make sure you locate your mixers before you start to bake your strawberry cake. If you follow this one simple step, it will result in reduced anxiety, it will keep things orderly in your drawers since you won’t toss everything out while looking for the mixers, and it will actually provide you with the ability to mix your cake. This is important.
Lesson 3: This may seem like a simple step, but it is often overlooked by those of us who have been baking for a few years and think we know how to bake stuff. However, if you read the recipe (remember: before you go to the store), you would know that M-Stew (Martha Stewart, duh) wants us to cream together the butter and sugar for three minutes and not add the sugar to the flour mix because you obviously can’t cream butter and flour. duh. You are so dumb. Oh, also, make sure you have your mixers for this step. But if, after leaving the kitchen in exasperation and then returning 30 minutes later because you hope the butter has softened enough in your house where the AC is currently broken (remind me again why we thought it was a good idea to turn on the oven and bake stuff when the AC is broken and it’s 80 degrees outside. Oh, that’s right. They were on SALE!!!!!), and then you try to mash up the butter mixture with a fork, this probably won’t work. You’ll eventually wind up fishing butter chunks out of the egg, butter and milk (oh wait, did we add milk. yes. yes, we did) and then you might remember reading somewhere on the internet that you can substitute applesauce for oil in recipes so this would probably work for the butter. So, add some applesauce and then sploosh in a little vegetable oil. Ya know, just in case. And even though your applesauce has been sitting in the fridge since the last time you were pre-cleansing, it’s still good!
Lesson 4: If you leave your kitchen in exasperation because you have four pounds of strawberries and your recipe is turning to pot, it’s best to take a break and just step away for a moment to regain your composure. Wine will help. But, if you leave all your ingredients out on the counter and you have a dog, you should probably either not leave your ingredients out on the counter or you should make sure your dog is not in the kitchen unsupervised.
Lesson 5: If you have an oven where the button to turn the timer ON is right next to the button where you turn the oven OFF, make sure you just hit the button to turn the timer on. If not, this cake that is supposed to take 30 minutes will take way longer than that and you won’t know fucking why it is taking so damn long.
If you follow all of these steps, you can have a cake that looks like this:
If you don’t follow these steps, it’s okay. You get a cake that looks like this:
Pretty damn close.