Strawberry Checker Board Cake

It was my parent’s wedding anniversary on Friday, so obviously I had to make a cake. They’ve been married for 33 years. I don’t even know that I’ll still like my purple Doc Martins in 33 years’ time, let alone another human being. I suppose I should feel happy and proud that there is still such a thing as long, happy marriages in this day and age but really it just freaks me out a bit. At my age my mum had already been married for a year…

Anyway, back to the cake, there was a recipe in The Great British Bake Off’s Showstopper book that I really wanted to try out- Checker Board, or Chess Board cake. The original recipe is a mix of vanilla and chocolate, but seeing as it was for their anniversary, I had to go pink.

I was so impressed with this cake. I really, genuinely didn’t think it was going to work. Especially because I had such a nightmare with nozzles/no nozzles/piping bags in general, but it actually came out great and I’m really pleased. Now don’t be put off by me moaning about it, because it really is very easy in proportion to how good it looks when you cut into it. Definitely one for a party if you want a bit of ‘wow factor’, without actually putting that much effort in.

Ingredients

350g unsalted butter

350g caster sugar

1tsp vanilla extract

6 large eggs

350g self-raising flour

Pinch of salt

Pink and red gel food colouring

To decorate

Butter

Icing sugar

Strawberries

Strawberry jam

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C. Prepare 3 20.5 cm sandwich tins by greasing the edges and covering the bottoms in baking parchment. (I didn’t bother reading the recipe properly and just greased the tins and lightly dusted them with flour and they came out just fine).

Add the butter to a large mixing bowl and beat until light and fluffy using an electric hand-held whisk.

Beat in the caster sugar.

Add the eggs, one at a time, with a spoonful of flour to avoid curdling the mixture. Add the vanilla extract here too.

Sift the flour and salt into the bowl and carefully fold it in until thoroughly combined.

Move half the mixture into a separate bowl.

Add the gel colouring to the mixture, making sure it’s all mixed in properly. I found that the hot pink gel wasn’t really making enough of a difference so I added some red as well and it made a lovely bright colour. Be warned that it does take almost a whole tube of gel colouring to get a decent colour.

This is where it gets a bit messy. I didn’t have two piping nozzles the same size so I thought it would make more sense to just cut the ends off of two disposable piping bags at the same point. It did work but I didn’t cut them big enough and there was a panic moment. It should be done with 1.5cm piping nozzles so make of that what you will about how far along to cut the bag. Fill one bag with the white mixture and one with the pink. A good tip my mum showed me about filling piping bags was to stand them in tall glasses.

In two of the cake tins pipe alternate rings of mixture, starting with the pink on the outside edge. The original recipe says you should do 4 rings, but I somehow ended up with 4 and a blob of the other colour in the middle. It doesn’t really matter as long as they are all consistent.

In the third tin pipe alternate rings, beginning this time with the white on the outside.

Bake them for 25-30 minutes or until springy to the touch and cooked through. Cool them on a wire rack.

To make the icing cream a large knob of butter in a mixing bowl using an electric whisk. Sift large spoonfuls of icing sugar, whisking in between. Chop the stems off of a handful of strawberries and slice into small chunks. Fold them into the icing, which will add a lot of moisture which makes the mixture sloppy, so sift in as much icing sugar as you need until the buttercream holds its shape.

Slap a bit of icing onto a nice plate or cake stand to help the cake stay in place. Put one of the cakes starting with the pink ring on the outside to act as the base layer of the cake.

Cover this in a layer of jam and icing, and then place the cake layer with the white ring on the outside on top. Repeat this with the last layer of cake.

Cover the entire cake in icing. Use a piping bag to pipe some beading detail around the edge of the cake. I then sliced the middle section out of some strawberries to decorate the outside edge, and placed some strawberries on top. You can decorate this cake however you like because the magic happens when you cut into it!