Raspberry Party Cake

This is a pretty cake. And, in Dorie’s Book, Baking From My Home to Yours it is even prettier.

We ate this cake on, May 28th, our tenth anniversary. We had plans to go to Atlanta for the weekend, but on this Thursday night we invited our friends join for dinner who also hit their tenth this year, with their twin 20-month old boys and my mom.

I made my husband’s favorite pesto pasta with scallops and shrimp and we are all still talking about how much those little boys ate. It was a night of joy!

My mom has a great sense of fun and romance and she supplied the stick figures, yet another one of her thrift shop finds. She also brought us flowers and my step mother sent us a card and gift certificate. It means a lot to us when our family is just as excited to celebrate our marriage with us as we are.

I don’t come from a family that celebrated many wedding milestones. It was more like divorce court and chaos. My grandparents managed to stay together, but they led separate lives, slept in separate rooms.

These past ten years have flown by so fast, and I feel blessed to be married to a man that makes me oatmeal and cappuccino every morning.

I wish I could say that making this cake is as easy as these last ten years of marriage. But, alas, this cake had to be made twice.  Take a look at the picture below and you will see the failures on the right. While they still tasted good, they were not nearly light or high enough to slice through the center and make a four-layer cake, and I wasn’t going to waste a very expensive raspberry jam on cake flops. I made them again and succeeded. My first time around I didn’t use cake flour, but used all purpose flour.

I learned a hard lesson…when a recipe calls for cake flour, use cake flour!

And, then there is one more reason. The cake, has a stick of butter which is fine, but the frosting has THREE sticks of butter and while one might think the more butter, the better, but I couldn’t eat it. This means four sticks of butter for the entire cake. Even if you could cut 12 pieces, that is 1/3 stick of butter per piece of cake.

When I originally read the ingredients, I was hesitant, but something inside me made me make this cake. I needed to see what four sticks of butter would do. In staying real, I couldn’t eat the frosting. I did enjoy the insides of the cake, and I love the idea of this type of cake. But, when I asked my friends if they would like to take some cake home, my girlfriend declined.

Now, in all fairness, the men liked the cake and her husband was happy that I delivered the rest of it to them the next day. But, she and I had absolutely no desire to eat a second piece.We adore coconut cake. Our wedding cake was a coconut cake made from an old time baker in Long Beach, California and we ate 3 pieces each at least the night of our wedding. It was unforgettable.

This could be unforgettable if there was a different frosting. I would probably fall back on the frosting here minus the lemon and adding in coconut.

Thanks to Carol of mix, mix, stir, stir for choosing the recipe.

Recipe for Cake
2 1/4 cups cake flour
1 tablespoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups whole milk or buttermilk (I used buttermilk)
4 large egg whites
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon pure lemon extract