Kids Cooking Thursday: Strawberry jelly cake

Today we made another Strawberry Cake, this time a variation on the jelly and cake mix theme from Little Ivy Cakes, whom I was partnered with for this month's Taste & Create. I'll let you check out the recipe here on her site, so you can drool over all her other gorgeous cupcakes while you are there. I only made a few changes, I used a whole punnet of chopped strawberries, because I'd thawed the whole punnet, and I added an extra Tbsp of jelly crystals because I used extra virgin olive oil (the only oil in the house) and then the batter didn't smell like strawberries anymore. Everything was going fine until the very last ingredient, the water. I think, had I not added that, it would have been perfect.

Instead, after 25 mins, the cake looked cooked, but when I pulled the shelf out of the oven to check, it wobbled inside! The middle was still liquid, under a thin crust. So I cut the top bit off and mixed it through the centre, turned the oven up to 200°C (from 180°C) and put it back in for another ten minutes. I then did the same thing and put it back in for five minutes, and then another five. Curse my non-fan-forced oven! It didn't look pretty, but it was cooked.

Then, I tried to be clever with the icing, using a recipe I saw in delicious. magazine. But it was a lamington recipe, so the icing turned out to be more of a glaze. I chose that because it had strawberry jelly in it too. So the combination of the runny jelly icing, and the rough, 'openness' of the top of the cake, turned this into a sort of "Poke" cake I guess. Which would have been fine, except the middle was already kinda super moist. I chopped up five of the strawberry October Tim Tams (the pink ribbon ones - man I love those!) and scattered them across the top. It looked nicer than the crummy camera on my phone could cope with. The inside doesn't look so nice, but it tasted great.

Loved the chopped Strawberry Tim Tams on top!

And after all that, Miss Two has changed her mind and decided she wants a blueberry cake with pink icing for her birthday. I think I may scream.
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