Food and Beverage Blog

Chocolate and strawberries! What could be better? There is just something about the two together that really can satisfy the human taste buds! The next time you are looking to try a new cake recipe, give this Chocolate Strawberry Layer Cake a try. Make it even better by dipping the strawberries about half-way up the side in melted chocolate and adding a whole dipped strawberry in the center. If that is too much of a chocolate look for you, dip the berries in white chocolate. Beautiful and yummy! This is a great cake for birthdays and other special occasions as well as an everyday dessert.

CHOCOLATE STRAWBERRY LAYER CAKE
2 eggs
1 1/3 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup strawberry preserves
1 pint fresh strawberries, hulled, halved

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and lightly flour two 9-inch cake pans; set aside. Beat eggs and sugar in a small mixing bowl until thick and light colored. In a large bowl, sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt together. Add the vegetable oil, buttermilk, and vanilla extract to the flour mixture; mix until blended. Fold in the eggs and sugar mixture. Pour batter evenly into the two prepared pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Cool in the pans on wire racks for about 10 minutes. Remove the cakes to the wire racks and cool completely. Place one layer on a serving plate. Spread the top of that layer with the strawberry preserves; cover preserves with the second layer. Prepare frosting and frost top of cake. Garnish with the strawberries by placing berries in a circle, cut side down, around the top edge of the cake.

FROSTING:

1 cup whipping cream
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Beat the whipping cream with the cocoa powder, confectioners’ sugar, and vanilla extract. Spread the frosting over the top of the cake; cover loosely and refrigerate until serving time. Garnish with the strawberries, as directed above, just before serving. Enjoy!

Salad Are “Appetizers” – Many who have poor or sluggish appetites will find that locked-in juices of salad become released through chewing and help stimulate the taste buds. Those with fussy appetites or the “nibble and peck” types, who just cannot eat a main dish, would do well to begin with a taste-stimulating raw salad. Released juices and nutrients immediately go to work to perk up your appetite. That stomach gurgle you feel while chewing the salad is Nature’s way of telling you that healthful good-eating pleasure is available after your finish this starter.

Salads Can Make Ordinary Foods Taste Like Gourmet Masterwork – By means of combining salads with an ordinary food that might otherwise be shunned; a gourmet masterwork has been created. Salads can be deliciously deceptive for your own good. You can include seafood’s, eggs, cheese products, beans seeds, etc., in a salad when those items by themselves might ordinarily be disliked. In this combination of flavors, ordinary foods become transformed into tasty treats.

Salads Wash Out Your Insides – As mentioned in by Dr Henry Sherman, in his book Food and Health, “Fruits and many vegetables also have an important relation to the maintenance of good conditions in the intestine. This is largely because of the bulk which they impart to the residues, thus giving the muscular mechanism of the intestine a change to be effective in keeping the residual mass moving and ensuring its elimination without undue delay, the fiber of those foods also serving to give the digestive apparatus its daily scrubbing.

Salads Encourage Natural Regularity – Internal sluggishness may be relieved with natural raw salads. A chief merit of raw salads is that they supply to the colon a considerable amount or raw starch which, being digested and converted into dextrin by the unused ferments always present, furnish the kind of nutrients necessary to encourage growth in the colon of necessary elements to combat putrefaction and encourage normal bowel action. Those who are addicted to harsh laxatives will find that beginning a meal with a raw salad will help in the problems of normal regulation. Try it for a week while you abstain from artificial laxatives.

Salads Are Rich Nutrients Source – Vitamins A and C, needed to nourish the bloodstream, the eyes, and the billions of body cells and tissues, and to promote speedier healing and resistance against allergies and infections, are abundant in raw salads. Many who are troubled with these healthy problems would do well to discover the delicious way to take your vitamins; through salads.