Fun Black 'n' White Sweet 'n' Sour Strawberry Party Cake Design

by Dorothea Hoffmann
(Absam, Tyrol, Austria)

Well, how should I start? It was a Friday in May and one of my BFFs was celebrating her b-day. I promised her a cake and the day before I specially went to pick strawberries for the cake.


Then I had the idea of using candy art for the cake. I had never made candy art before so I was looking for recipes on the internet. I didn't have the right ingredients at home but I found something else. This video about a guy named Ron Ben Israel. I didn't know that person and I was like, who the hell is that? (Now I know who he is though and although I am just finishing school, I already know I want a wedding cake designed by him....;))


I saved the internet address of his homepage and began making the cake. I have to admit, I didn't have a plan what to make. Usually I just look for some stuff in the cupboard and make whatever pops into my head. I also don`t use a scale for the ingredients because I just don't like it.


That's why every single one of my cakes is an individual. I found oranges and orange liqueur, white chocolate and dark chocolate, sugar, eggs,flour, baking powder and some other stuff I liked as well as fruit gums.
How did I make it?


First I took two oranges and peeled them. I boiled H2O and put the pod and cinnamon into it. I quite don't know anymore how much icing sugar I put to it, but it still tasted a little sour. I then put it into the fridge to cool down.(It was kind of like orange jam...)


I started beating the eggwhites of five eggs and put some caster sugar to them. Then I beat the egg yolk and put butter and sugar to it. I melted the dark chocolate and added it and some orange liqueur to the yolk texture.


I filtered the flower, mixed it with the baking powder and mixed it together with the egg white-texture to the yolk texture (A lot of textures right; but there are more to come^^)
I then put the whole texture into a squared baking tray and put it into the oven for 30 minutes (I guess ;))


While it was baking, I beat 4 more egg-whites and put caster sugar to it. I also beat the yolks, put some more sugar to it and mixed it with flour and the egg-whites.


I put that mixture into another squared tray and baked it for 15 minutes.
I love the scent of cake in the oven... Every time I bake a cake, the house is filled with the scent of chocolate, caramel or fruits... For me it's like Christmas when I was little, when my mommy took out the cookies from the oven and served them...

Anyway, I took out both cakes and left them outside to cool down for a little.
In the meantime I melted the white chocolate. Well, that didn't go too well at first... I normally don't work with white chocolate so I but butter to it... Yeah, yeah I know that was a mistake by NOW.... But back then I kind of didn't.


Luckily I had some more chocolate and I did it right then. I dipped some strawberries into the chocolate and put them in the fridge to cool down.


I took some more strawberries and cut out the inner pod of the strawberries (I also kept some aside for the decoration). Then I filled some with dark chocolate and some with punch icing.
Then I fetched the cakes and cut each into 4 regular squares. I had to make two cakes because it would have been to much for pastry for one cake.

I used two "white cake"(that was the second cake I made)squares as the bases for the cakes and coated them with the orange jam I made earlier. Then I put one "black cake" (the chocolate cake) square on top of each of the white squares. I coated them with the jam as well. Then I put the two left white squares on top of the "cake blocks" (I don't know how to call that....) and coated them as well. The last two black squares were the "roofs" of the two cakes.


The title "Black 'n' White Sweet 'n' Sour Strawberry Party" wasn't some random picked title. The pastry is actually brown-white, but "Brown'n' White" didn't sound that awesome, that's why I called it Black 'n' White... I made the orange jam sour and the coating and the pastry was sweeter.


I thought it was a good balance between sweet and sour. (Though the orange jam was also a bit bitter). That's why I called it Sweet 'n' Sour. This would have already been a nice title for the cake, but I used a lot of strawberries for the deco (I will come to the deco later) and I included them in the title (Strawberry Party)...
The decoration...

That's my favorite part when baking a cake. Some people call my style freaky and a bit crazy, but I actually like that. I rarely picture my cake before I design it, the ideas just come and go. Sometimes I end up redecorating my cake three or four times^^...


I coated the surfaces of the cakes with dark chocolate and powder sugar. I put the cakes on clean plates (I think that's always the hardest thing to do, but I have to do it after the coating, cause I always dirty the plate....) and fetched the filled strawberries and the rest of the washed ones.

I cut the filled ones in half and put them around one of the cakes (there were a lot left, I gave them to my brother, he has a SWEEEEET tooth...) I then chipped some unfilled strawberries and put them around the other cake.I also quartered some more and put them on top of the cakes.


The finishing touch were the fruit gums. I just arranged them randomly.... The cakes were really colorful.... (That's also what I hear from people.. My cakes don`t look like anyone elses....^^ Compliment or not? I don't know, I like being all crazy and not normal...)


As I mentioned earlier, the cake was made for one of my BFFs, Hannah... I gave her only one of the cakes and my little sister took the other one to school (her class always asks me to make more cakes for them.... I would if I had time...)

Anyway, I took the cake for Hannah to school and we arranged a "secret, inside the class"-party for her... There were muffins and another cake with lots of cream, juice and sparkling wine (if you wonder, alcohol in school is also forbidden in Austria, where I come from, but it was my friend's 18th and we didn't care at that moment...My biology teacher even drunk the alcohol with us...;) Just a bit)...


Some of my classmates kept Hannah busy outside the room while we were decorating the room with balloons and paper arts... We turned off the lights, lighted all the candles we had with us and Hannah came in... We sang a lot for her...


(Luckily, we are a music class, so it wasn't that bad....) We had like 3 kilogram of cake and muffins, a lot for twenty people... My cake was the last to be cut, but it was finished really fast, so I think my class liked it. They also told me it tasted good and I know that sounds paranoid, but if my friends tell me somethings pretty or good, or that I look nice, I can't always believe it, because I know sometimes we all say something nice because they are our friends....


The funny thing is (it's actually not that funny) that I am allergic to fruit sugar, milk sugar and sorbite and I shouldn't try my cakes or the ingredients, but I always do... That's why I remember my cakes even longer than other (actually just the abdominal pain)... I thought it tasted good....


One thing I learned after baking the cake. I write down my recipes now, in case I want to do them again.

I didn't plan on participating in this cake contest, I didn't even know it existed.But as you know, I saved the address of Ron Ben Israel's homepage. After I returned home from school, I opened the page again, and somehow I found myself here, I found the "cake contest page". I don't plan on winning. There are a lot of people out there, they make better cakes than me, whose designs are better. I do it with heart and I like to share my joy for baking.(And my recipes if someone wants them) And even if I am not that practiced on baking yet, I am trying really hard. If I had a wish right now, I wouldn't wish for winning the contest, I would really like to meet Ron Ben Israel instead.

Chocolaty greetings from Austria ;) Dorothy the Redhead