Prinsesstårta

 

A young lady I know just turned 2 years old. She requested a strawbubby cake on her birthday. My client left it at that. This left me with a lot of room for creativity, but also some confusion. I have little historical record to draw on. As you can imagine, her experience with cakes is rather limited. I was left with all sorts of questions. Is she a frosting kind of gal? Or are plain cakes her thing? I am not a fan of elaborate fondant cakes which are all the rage these days, but would she enjoy figurines of assorted zoo animals on her birthday cake? I spent a few days fretting over this tough project. After spending too many hours on online research, typing in "strawberry cake" into Google and Youtube like a zombie, I concluded that using strawberry puree in the cake is not a good idea. The experts I consulted said, universally, that this would add too much moisture to the cake batter. I did see a recipe on the Smitten Kitchen website for a Pink Lady Cake which uses strawberry puree. But I crossed it off my list because it called for an alarming number of egg whites. Some other recipes called for freeze dried strawberries. But I wanted to use the real deal. It is the fruit that my client enjoys the most. 

I eventually decided on a Melissa Clark recipe for a strawberry shortcake - a two layer sponge cake sandwiched with whipped cream frosting and lots of fresh berries. I thought I'd add some cream cheese to the whipped cream to help stabilize it. Simple, and elegant. I made the sponge cake on the eve of the birthday. But I itched to do a little more than whip cream and slice strawberries after having spent so many hours on research. And so I decided to cover the cake with a layer of marzipan. Marzipan is one of my favorite things. It's supposed to be easy to make at home - ground almonds, confectioner's sugar, and egg white. This mini project did not go well. I used too much egg white in the first go around, and ended up having to add more confectioner's sugar to make up for it. I then had to add more ground almonds to balance it out, and then realized I needed yet more sugar. And so it was that I ended up in a seemingly never ending cycle of sugar and ground almonds. It's like the early days in every novice chapati maker's life. First, you add extra flour to a sticky dough to firm it up. But then you end up a dough that's too dry to be rolled. Naturally, you add more water to the mix, but apparently you added too much because you are back to a sticky dough. Finally, after going through this cycle a few times, you end up with dough that looks half-decent, but it's enough to feed an army. I, too, ended up with a decent log of marzipan but I needed to find a recipe in which it would play a more prominent role than initially planned. And that is how I ended up on the BBC website, reading Mary Berry's recipe for Prinsesstårta or princess cake, which is a Swedish layer cake, full of custard, jam, whipped cream, and marzipan. Who can say no to that constellation of sweet things? Traditionally, the marzipan is colored a pretty shade of green. I had already colored my marzipan pink in keeping with the strawberry theme, so this would just have to be a non-traditional princess cake. 

I've eaten princess cake before and love it. But I cringed a little at the idea of princess cake for a two year old girl's birthday. Generally speaking, I don't love the idea of designating little girls princesses. Why not let them run wild, scream, jump, scrape their knees, and act un-princess like to their heart's content? But I then realized that princess cake, seen in a different light, could be a fitting birthday cake for my client. Like a true princess, she has a talent for getting her way, and for skillfully subverting rules with clever use of tantrums. She is the quintessential monarch, not of the pretty in pink princess variety, but in the sense that she rules her kingdom with an iron fist.

Traditionally, a princess cake does not contain any fresh fruit, just a layer of jam. But given the brief I had been tersely handed, I decided to use lots of sliced strawberries between the two layers of cake.

So there it was. A princess cake for a princess who fits the mould (or not), depending on how you look at it.  

I enjoyed making the cake. It has several components, but they can be made separately. I made the sponge cake and marzipan the previous day, and did the filling and assembly on the birthday. Rolling out the marzipan really thin between two layer of wax paper was tricky. When I laid the pink sheet over the filled sponge cake gently, it felt like I was putting a princess to bed.

My husband said this is probably the best cake I have ever baked. I have to agree. The client didn't say very much when presented with it, but the gusto with which she dug into the cake with her "frok" suggested she enjoyed it. 

Notes: I made the Melissa Clark recipe as written except I slashed the sugar, using only 2/3rds of what was called for, as I usually do with all American dessert recipes. I made 1/2 of the Mary Berry vanilla custard recipe, but used only 236 ml of heavy cream (1/2 pint carton) for the whipped cream because that's all I had. The sugar called for in the Mary Berry recipe is perfect. I tried cutting it, and ended up having to add more to make up. Folding the whipped cream into the custard is a lesson in gentleness. I recommend doing it bit by bit - fold in part of the custard with part of the whipped cream, layer it on the cake, and repeat with the next batch of custard and whipped cream.  Her recipe asks that whipped cream be reserved to be mounded on top of the upper layer of cake. I used the custard cream combination instead, thinking that would be a firmer base for the marzipan to be laid on. I used store bought strawberry preserve. I read that marzipan should not be refrigerated so I just left it on the countertop overnight. Marzipan has raw egg white, so I made sure to refrigerate the cake for the three days that it lasted. We had no trouble finishing it in that time, but this is a cake that is best consumed within 2-3 days because of the raw fruit.