RHC: She Loves Me Cake--sort of

It's a free choice week for the Heavenly Cakes bake-along, and my list of "cakes Marie has baked and I haven't" is getting pretty short. Well, I think it's at eight cakes, so maybe not quite that short. Anyway, at the top was the She Loves Me Cake, which was the second cake Marie tackled. A little negotiation with younger niece to incorporate chocolate in the presentation, and we had a plan.

The result didn't look much like "She Loves Me" cake, though. First off, my flat decorative NordicWare baking pan is the snowflake design instead of the daisy--more appropriate for this time of the year, really, even though Atlanta may not see snow until February (or not at all some winters). Rose gives options of splitting the cake and filling it with lemon curd and blueberries (the Lemon Daisy Cake) or with whipped cream and berries (Berry Shortcake). I wanted to use the berry shortcake option (though I prefer a slightly sweet biscuit for a real strawberry shortcake). With this need for chocolate this week, raspberries seemed like a good choice for the berries. And that chocolate requirement....the hot fudge sauce from the ice cream cake was really yummy, and pretty easy. That'd do. Maybe my She Loves Me Cake is "Chocolate snowflake raspberry shortcake with hot fudge sauce".


This cake is on the quick and easy list, and my only slight reservation about that rating is that it's an egg-yolk only cake. That doesn't make the preparation harder, but I find the excess egg whites to be an annoyance despite all the Heavenly Cakes that have needed them. Egg separating aside, the cake mixes up very quickly using Rose's butter cake technique of adding the butter and some liquid to the dry ingredients, then adding the egg mixed with other liquid ingredients. I spread the batter in my snowflake pan, and it was into the oven. Despite my setting my timer for 5 minutes under the baking time, the cake had started to pull away from the sides of the pan when I checked it. My sister-in-law felt the cake was again a little dry (I didn't notice myself, but that might have been the presentation), and perhaps that touch of over-baking did it.

I cooled the cake and made the fudge sauce, then asked younger niece to come over and experiment with some decorations to highlight the snowflake design. As we were adding chocolate, I melted a little 62% chocolate and handed her a small paintbrush, and she put a chocolate coating over a few of the snowflakes.

That was it, except for the assembly. I cut cake squares, split them in half, and put raspberries on the bottom piece. A healthy (ha!) glob of whipped cream covered the raspberries, then the other piece of cake went on top. Finally I drizzled warm fudge sauce over the top.


Tasting results: Sister-in-law noted a little cake dryness, as above, but had found a little whipped cream easily dealt with the problem. My brother said the cake made a nice platform for the other components. :) The kids chimed in with 'really good', and I failed to get the picture of younger niece licking the last of the fudge sauce off her plate.

I did make an effort to judge the cake separately from the berries, cream, and chocolate, and really liked it. It has a lovely even crumb, a nice vanilla flavor, and a good yellow color from the (5+) egg yolks. I'd eat it plain, or jazzed up any number of ways--the lemon curd idea will be one of them, I'm sure.