Like many if you I'm sure I grew up with the Women's Weekly Birthday cake book. Every birthday it would come out, and my mum would moan in self doubt at my selection. Traditions have moved on and now I do the same thing. Starting out with great confidence but really only a 50% success rate. Don't get me wrong everyone compliments and there are oohs and ahhh. However I know the short cuts I have taken or where I expected it to work out better.
So full of confidence I started the quest for the perfect naked cake.
I baked the rather simple basic cake layers. A chose to do two chocolate and one vanilla layer to add to the mix. Okay I did have one failure, so actually I cooked four cakes, but that's by the by.
Now on to the decorating. The actual fun stuff.
My first tip is to cut each layer carefully, and as even as possible. In between each cake layer I added strawberry jam, strawberries and cream. All my favourite things.
All went well which was fairly surprising.
Finally on the top layer I added sifted icing sugar, but not too much. Just enough to add a little freshness of white.
Then a few strawberries, and some cut flowers.
Our only problem was serving up. It was a very tall cake, so we had very high slices.
I would highly recommend giving this a go. It was fairly easy and the result was an impressive cake that everyone liked and commented on. Perfect for small parties.
