Valentine Cake

                                                   HEARTS & FLOWERS CAKE

Various food colors and fillings could be added to both the cake and the butter cream filling.

Preparation and cooking time: 1 Hour

Cake:

1 Cup Margarine
1 Cup Granulated Sugar
4 Eggs
1 3/4 Cup of Self Rising Flour

Cream 1 cup of margarine and the granulated sugar till light and fluffy.
Beat in the eggs gradually.
Sift the flour and fold in.
Divide mixture and transfer to two greased waxed-paper-lined 8 1/2 inch heart-shaped pans.
Bake at 350 degrees for 25-35 minutes.

Butter Cream Frosting:

1/2 Cup Margarine
2 Cups Confectioners Sugar

Cream the 1/2 cup margarine and the confectioners sugar together to make the butter cream, adding a little hot water if necessary.

Spread between layers and pipe on top of cake.

Decoration:

Crystallized Flowers
Angelica

FOOD NOTES:

My experience with Butter Cream Frosting is to warm the margarine in the microwave just 15 sec. before mixing with the confectioners sugar. It whips up creamy and fluffy with an electric mixer.

For a richer flavor use real butter.

An excellent filling would be a custard filling such as in a Boston Cream Pie.

You can buy inexpensive piping tubes for decorative touches.

You can also buy decorative sugar shapes, flowers or hearts for decorations.

Also if you have not tried a Spring-Form Cake pan, I suggest you try. I love it and that is all I use now. It releases the baked cake with little effort!

I searched and found some more good tips when it comes to baking a cake. {Some science behind the reasons!}

1. An important step in baking is to make sure that ingredients are well combined and aerated. Creaming butter and sugar together with an electric mixer is important to have a baked good rise high and have uniform texture.

2. When you cream butter with sugar small air pockets are formed. When the baking soda or powder produces gas during baking it gets trapped in the air pockets and expands, causing the cake/cookie to lift or rise.

3. It is important your butter is room temperature and soft, but not too soft. Butter should be around 60 degrees F and indent when pressed with your thumb. The butter is firm enough to crack if pressed hard. Once the sugar is incorporated into the butter with a mixer for several minutes, the batter will be light, fluffy and off-white in color. If the butter is too warm the butter will be too soft and look shiny and wet, resulting in a flat dense cake.

Why sift flour and dry ingredients?

Sometimes a recipe will ask that you sift flour and other times not. There are two reasons to sift flour. One is to aerate the flour and get rid of lumps. Often times in transportation the flour gets packed down and lumps can form due to moisture. Sifting will fluff the flour. Other times a recipe will ask that you sift flour with other dry ingredients (for example: sift flour with salt, baking powder and cocoa powder). This is a good way to evenly disperse the ingredients before adding them to the wet ingredients.

Why do some recipes ask that you alternately add dry ingredients with wet ingredients instead of just dumping everything in all at once?

Some recipes ask that you add your dry ingredients alternately with wet ingredients starting and ending with the wet ingredient. A cake batter is basically an emulsion. By adding the dry ingredients alternately with wet ingredients a uniform batter is formed and the result is fewer and smaller holes and a fine tender texture. If everything is added at once and mixed together the texture will be coarser with large.

There really are reasons why a recipe calls for you to do certain steps. When followed, you will have the best outcome. Happy Baking!

This recipe came from one of my favorite dessert cookbooks, called Sweet Success.

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Cindy