Alice in Onederland Birthday Cake

We did an Alice in Onederland Birthday Cake for Harper’s birthday, which turned out so cute!

I’ve never been obsessed with Alice in Wonderland but there are so many fun cute things about it. I love the colors and the cute tea party things. Alice’s dress and all the things. I started getting the stuff for in and I was loving it more and more. I stressed about the cake and I was going to make it into a two tier cake but then I changed my mind last minute and just did a simple topsy turvy cake. All I did was Youtube how to do it and then it was so much easier than I thought it would be.

Ingredients

2 sticks unsalted butter room temperature
10 ounces granulated sugar
6 ounces egg whites room temperature
4 ounces milk room temperature
6 ounces strawberry reduction room temperature
2 ounces vegetable oil
1 Tablespoon lemon juice fresh
1 ½ teaspoon strawberry extract
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon Pink food coloring
14 ounces all purpose flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt

Strawberry Reduction

32 ounces fresh or frozen strawberries thawed
4 ounces sugar
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 pinch salt

Directions

Strawberry Reduction

Place your thawed or fresh strawberries into the blender and blend until smooth.
Place the strawberry puree, sugar, lemon zest, and lemon juice into a medium saucepan and bring it to a boil.
Once bubbling, reduce heat to medium-low and slowly reduce the puree until you have two cups of liquid and the mixture is very thick like tomato sauce. This can take between 40-60 minutes. Occasionally stir the mixture to prevent burning.
I did this the night before and then put it in the fridge.

Strawberry Cake Instructions

Make sure to take your strawberry reduction out of the refrigerator 1 hour before making your cake so that it comes to room temperature.
Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and preheat to 350ºF.
Grease two 8″ cake pans prepared so the cake will release easily.
In a separate medium bowl, whisk together the milk, oil, strawberry reduction, strawberry emulsion, vanilla extract, lemon zest, lemon juice, and pink food coloring.
In a separate medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
Add room temperature butter to your stand mixer with the paddle attachment and beat at medium speed until smooth and shiny, about 30 seconds.
Gradually sprinkle in the sugar, beat until mixture is fluffy and almost white, about 3-5 minutes.
Add the egg whites one at a time, beating 15 seconds in between. Your mixture should look cohesive at this point. If it looks curdled and broken, your butter or egg whites were too cold.
Mix on low speed and add about a third of the dry ingredients to the batter, followed immediately by about a third of the milk mixture, mix until ingredients are almost incorporated into the batter.
Repeat the process 2 more times. When the batter appears blended, stop the mixer and scrape the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. If it looks like ice cream, you did it right!
Divide the batter evenly between the prepared pans.
Bake cakes at 350ºF until they feel firm in the center about 30-35 minutes.
Place pans on top of a wire rack and let cool for 10 minutes. Then flip your cakes onto the racks and cool completely.
Decorate however you want. I used Swiss Meringue Buttercream and it was amazing!