Looks Sweet & Innocent...

I decided to make a lovely cake for Valentine's Day.

I don't want to sound arrogant, but I've made a lot of lovely cakes in my time. So this should have been a relatively simple task.

You might gather from the fact that it gets it's own blog post, that it wasn't.

Looks all sweet and innocent, right? I even used copious amounts of edible food glitter* **.

That pale layer right there, THAT is where the trouble starts. Now someone in our house (who isn't me) LOVES strawberry flavoured things (but won't eat strawberries...don't get me started. Anyway...) so I thought I would make a chocolate cake with an awesome strawberry layer in the middle. I've had a major thing about multi-layer cakes, ever since I saw this video of the 24-layer chocolate cake on the menu at Steakhouse 55 in Disneyland, CA.

So I made the chocolate layers, no problem. Then came The Demon Layer (as it is now known). The problem seems to lie squarely with this stuff:

Super Cook Strawberry Flavouring.

I can't smell the stuff without gagging, but what the hell, it's Valentine's Day. I measured the satanic liquid. MEASURED. And for 500ish grams of cake mix, I used UNDER the recommended amount. Way under. I also added half a bottle of fuschia pink food colouring (also Super Cook) which, as you can see, did bugger all to the colour of the cake. (Starting to lose faith, Super Cook).

*bake* *cool* *assemble* *decorate liberally with edible glitter and giant Smarties*

Then we came to try the lovely cake. In fact, we were so excited to try the lovely cake that I forgot to take a photo of the complete lovely cake, hence the photos have a chunk missing.

At first I dismissed this photograph because of the screwy focus. Then I realised that it's actually quite cool, because it draws the eye right into the cake. And who wouldn't want to be up to their eyes in cake?!

Well, not this cake, my friends.

Even the faux-strawberry-flavour lover was stumped to find a word that adequately described how disgusting that strawberry layer is.

But then I discovered a method of eating the cake that makes it all sweet and innocent and delicious again:

Around these parts we call it "Destrawberrification".

* I went to buy the edible food glitter at Hobbycraft. It wasn't labelled "Edible Food Glitter", so I took it to the counter to pay for it, and asked:

"This is the glitter you can eat, right?"

"Well,  you can...In moderation...I mean you're not supposed to just eat it straight out of the pot with a spoon, or anything, but in moderation...*sees my concerned/slightly offended face face* I'm sorry, I'm sure you wouldn't do that, but we have to say that now."

"Now?"

"We're not allowed to talk about why..."

I still REALLY want to know why.

** Edible food glitter is completely inert to the human digestive system. As in, if you forgot you ate it the night before, you might be slightly concerned the following morning.

#FairyPoop

;)