{Bake} Meyer Madness Part III | Strawberry-Filled Meyer Mint Mini Cakes
April 25, 2011 in All Posts, Bake
. . . and for the finale . . .
What better way to celebrate the last of our Meyer lemon stash and all of the red, ripe strawberries overflowing on our kitchen countertop than strawberry-filled meyer mint mini cakes?
This time, Jane re-joined the madness from Part I after her brief hiatus in Part II.
First, she mixed the cake (see the flour spray evidence in the photos below).
Then, while the cake was in the oven baking, she removed the strawberry stems from four cups (about 3 baskets) of our organic strawberry stash:
This activity is a great exercise in organization and if your toddler is like mine, he will enjoy the methodical process of picking a strawberry from the first bowl, carefully pulling off the stem, and placing the usable strawberry and discarded stems in their respective bowls.
Next, she squished the ripe strawberries in her fists and poked them silly with her little fingers. When it was clear the strawberries were definitely dead, we placed them in a pot with 1/2 cup sugar (you could increase to 1 cup) and 2 tbsp butter (you could reduce to 1 tbsp), brought them to a boil, and then kept them on a medium heat simmer until the berry mixture cooked into a nice sauce. By “nice,” I do not mean a nice “gourmet” strawberry sauce, but a nice “chunky, toddler-chopped” sauce.
Next, she helped mixing my Favorite Buttercream Frosting. I roughly chopped and added a ridiculous amount of mint leaves: about 3 to 4 tablespoons (but you could reduce to a dignified amount, like 1 to 2 teaspoons), and added an insane amount of lemon juice and crude lemon zest: 3 to 4 tablespoons juice and 1 to 2 tablespoons rind (you could reduce to 1 to 2 tablespoons juice and 1 to 2 teaspoons zest). Be aware that if you use as much lemon juice as I did, you’ll probably have to add more confectioner’s sugar to the finished frosting to stiffen it up a bit.
After the mini-cakes cooled, I used a melon baller to hollow out the cakes. Then I filled them with the cooked strawberry chunks and sauce. The cake will soak in the sauce, so after the first round of filling, go ahead and top off your cakes a second time.
Finally, I piped the frosting on top of the mini-cakes and Jane helped present them to Grandma for her birthday.
You can skip the frosting completely and still enjoy a very delicious strawberry mini-cake for a head start on a taste of summer. Enjoy!
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Chrissy – who has written 426 posts on The Outlaw Mom® Blog - Creative Living in a Conventional World.
[…] you’ve been reading, you know that Jane loves to mix and stir and bake, so it’s no surprise that baking experiments are one of our favorite rainy day activities […]