CCC No 9 - Strawberry Diaquiri Cake - Cake in the City

Our most recent meeting of  the South Lancashire Clandestine Cake club was our first in Preston city centre, in celebration of this event a theme of "Cake in the City" was chosen.. On a wild wet and windy night we arrived with our cakes at our lovely venue "Winckleys", a cute coffee shop in the historic centre of the city. 

Our very talented bakers certainly rose to the challenge of the theme and the event was well attended considering we were competing with Great British Bake off on TV and the weather too, members old and new brought along fabulous creations of a pina colada cake, mojito cake, strawberry diaquiri cake, handbag cake, red velvet cake, "parkin" cake and a pear and ginger cake. We all had a fabulous time and were very impressed with Winckleys which most of us hadn't visited before.

Winckleys serves a great selections of beverages and refreshments and uses some great local suppliers like the Ginger Baker too. Please pay this local independent coffee shop a visit when you are in the city and you are sure of a warm "Winckleys" welcome.

South Lancs CCC enjoying the cake @ Winckleys

For the event I made a Strawberry Diaquiri cake, here's the recipe if you fancy having a go, interestingly enough all the cakes that where representing cocktails were rum based cocktails, I wonder what that says about our membership.

Strawberry cake 

• 2 1/4 cups plain flour - sifted
• pinch of salt
• 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup of softened butter or quality margarine
• 1 1/2 cups caster sugar
• 2 large free range eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla paste
• 3/4 cups crushed fresh strawberries

Method

• Pre heat oven to 180c / 170c fan
• Grease and base line 2 x 8" round cake tins
• Sift the flour, salt and baking powder onto a plate
• In your mixer combine the butter(or marg), sugar, eggs and vanilla
• Add the flour mix and strawberries in 2 halves to your mixer, mix until you have a well incorporated mixture
• Scrape into the prepared tins and smooth the top 
• Bake for 25 -30 minutes until the cakes test as done with a skewer or cocktail stick
• Cool in the tins, whilst still warm prick all over and pour over diaquiri syrup

Diaquiri syrup

• 50ml water
• 50ml white rum
• juice and rind of 1 lime
• 50g sugar

Method

• Heat the water and sugar to make a syrup, remove from heat and and lime juice and rind
• When cool then add the rum

Cake filling

• Sliced fresh strawberries
• Quantity of whipped cream

Decoration

• White chocolate dipped fresh strawberries
• White chocolate shards with strawberry popping candy

You can find Winckleys just off Winckley Square at 12 Winckley St, Preston.