Simple Flower Pattern with Strawberries

It's summer time and it's almost time to pick the July strawberries.
Strawberries are not only yummy but they make great decorations for your cakes!
You can make simple yet elegant designs all by slicing up strawberries and placing them in specific patterns.

The default shape of the strawberries are great to work with. Pick out the small and large strawberries and dedicate them for different roles. (large sharp ones for the base of the flower, smaller pieces go go in the middle etc)

This flower design is actually very easy. The only thing that took a lot of time was slicing up the strawberries.
The cake I baked in this post is the Almond Chiffon cake from the Cake Bible.
They're 9 inch in diameter and 2 in tall each.

I used Raspberry Greek Yogurt as the filling in-between.

Take your strawberries, wash them and pluck out the greens at the top.
Then slice up the strawberries vertically.
Once you have a good pile of various sizes, you can start assembly.

Use the bigger pieces with a pointy end first and lay them in a big ring. I centered mine so that it'll end up right in the middle.
Once you're done 1 ring, lay the next ring overlapped on the first one. Overlap them halfway on top of the first layer and put the new slice in the middle between the strawberries that are already there.
Keep on going until you're almost in the middle
With my 9 inch cake and the first layer about an inch in from the edge, I only needed 3 layers of strawberries before I started using smaller strawberries and standing them up.
For the middle, use smaller slices and slant the first batch. Keep on going and eventually your middle ones will stand up straight.
If you want, you can even use a whole strawberry in the middle with the pointy side up.

Since I had left over strawberry slices, I did the sides as well.
No need for any yogurt or cream to stick the strawberries.

Pretty and simple!
Enjoy your summer treat!!

New Cook book - The Bread Bible

I'm so excited!!
I just got a new book as my birthday present. It's Rose Levy Beranbaum's "The Bread Bible".
I love her books. I have her 2 cake books and her pastry book. This adds nicely to my collection.

I had a chance to finally make bread over the weekend.
It was so good.
I tried the cheddar loaf and I was so happy with the flavour and the texture of the bread.
The cheddar flavour was really nice, I didn't have to add anything to the bread when I eat it as toast because it's so full of flavour already.

That pre-fermented sponge thing is really interesting. But I think my fridge is too cold for it because when I measure the temperature, it was below the temperature Rose noted it should be if you put it in the fridge.

I baked the bread on Sunday, today is Thursday and it's still soft.
So it seems to last as long as the Chinese soft white bread recipe that I had posted.
Only thing is that it used all purpose flour instead of bread flour. So that helped with the tenderness.

I'm going to slowly work my way through the book and do some experiments and adjustments along the way.
Once I get going with experiments and adjustments I'll be able to start posting recipes ;)