Strawberry Lemonade Cake & Macarons

I was impatiently waiting for the arrival of Tessa Huff’s new book Icing on the Cake and had mistakenly thought that my local bookstore would have it in stock when it came out. But NO. So I had to wait a few extra days since I didn’t pre-order. It was so worth the wait! It’s so beautiful! And I’m very excited that it includes other types of desserts in addition to layered cakes. I knew my birthday was coming up soon so I was looking through the book with that in mind and settled on the cake below. It’s actually the cake from the cover of the book. It’s a strawberry cake with lemon cream filling, an ombre icing exterior, and strawberry lemonade macarons on top as garnish. Conveniently my birthday was yesterday and I had Good Friday off so I got to spend the whole day baking! (Otherwise I might not have attempted the macrons given my not-super-successful first attempt about a year ago). And voila, here she is!

I decided to start with the macarons because I thought it would take the longest. (It did.) I decided to go with the Italian meringue method outlined in the book instead of the French one because Tessa describes it as being a bit more work but less finnicky, and that seemed like a good thing to me! With the Italian method, you boil sugar and water together and then stream it into the whisked egg whites while the mixer is on. This made a much more stable meringue than my previous attempt, because a few other things went awry and the macarons still turned out pretty well. The first thing that went weird is that when I tried to pulse my almond flour and icing sugar in a food processor to get it more fine, as recommended in the recipe, it got clumpy instead of more fine and reaalllyyy hard to get through the sieve. I think there was too much friction happening in the vessel, because the mixture was really warm to the touch when I took it out and I think that made an almond buttery texture by mistake. So I forced it through the metal sieve which helped but was veeerrryy time-consuming. At the end I kind of got sick of it and dumped the remainder into the bowl and decided to pretend it had gone through the sieve. At this point I was thinking the macarons were probably not going to work well but I still wanted to do the whole thing.

Then, I forgot to add my gel food dye early on in the folding so ended up having to do likely a few too many folds in order to get it incorporated evenly, which lead to slightly too-runny batter as you can see below. I had drawn templates but the batter ran and spread a lot more than I thought it would and a bunch of the circles joined together. I was able to counteract this a bit more on my second tray.

But after all that, they turned out really well! I got honestly pretty great feet as you’ll see in the photos further below, they weren’t hollow, I had a nice shell on top, and the only thing I would tweak for next time is the amount of times I folded the batter to make them a little more compact in terms of surface area and give them a bit more height. I’m very pleased though, and pleasantly surprised! To fill them, I made a circle of lemon cream on each one and then put a bit of strawberry jam in the middle, as recommended in the recipe. I ended up breaking the joined up ones apart so you can see on some of them that they’ve got a bit of a bump on one edge.

The cake is strawberry, which is achieved by making a reduced strawberry puree and using that in the batter. I think for next time I might reduce the amount of milk by a 1/2 cup and double the amount of reduced puree in the batter in order to get a stronger strawberry flavour. The batter was slightly pink from the strawberry, but I tinted it with a little pink to enhance the effect.

The ombre icing effect was WAY easier than I thought it was going to be. I got three colours of gel food colouring (which was also much less expensive than I had remembered it) – peach, pink, and yellow. I used the yellow in the macarons. You crumb coat the cake and let it chill in the fridge for a bit. You put a big blob of the white icing on top, keeping aside a bit to stay white (I used the whipped vanilla buttercream instead of the Swiss meringue buttercream after today’s first try at it ended up splitting apart) and divide the rest in three. Each of the three gets one of the colours. Then, you put a ring of the darkest colour around the bottom (pink for me), then you mix the rest of the pink with a bit of the next colour (peach), and make a ring of that, then do a ring of peach, then mix the peach remainder with a bit of the next colour (yellow), do a ring of that, do a ring of the yellow, and then mix the remainder of the yellow with the white to do the final ring. Then, you smooth it all together.

Tessa shows how you pipe a ring with a piping bag around, and I do have a cake spinner that I was using, but at that point in the day I could not hack the idea of filling/emptying/washing six times and I just used a spreading knife to do it, which was obviously less precise but still worked for me.

And then you smooth it! I have this cake decorating kit my friend Georgina gave me for Christmas the year before this one, and it has loads of piping tips, a great reusable silicon piping bag, a cake spinner, an offset spatula, and these scraper/smoother things that I had never used before yesterday. My cake shifted a bit due to the consistency of the lemon cream filling and the amount I used, but the smoother made it much easier to make the sides of the cake perpendicular to the surface. I was amazed at how good it looked once I started smoothing!

And then I put the macarons on top using a little dab of icing to hold them in place! I’m so happy with how it looks, and it was a big show-stopper at my family dinner last night (although everyone berated me for making my own birthday cake). It was so nice in the midst of my busy life right now to have a full day off from work/school/everything to just make a big ole fancy cake and get to try macarons again. These ones went so well that I see myself doing them more often in the future and experimenting with fun flavours!