Vanilla cake, swiss meringue butter cream, whipped cream and strawberries were the building materials for this cake. I “almost” slacked on my goal this month because I was SUPER busy finishing school work before spring break while at the same time getting ready for (guess what?!) a trip to Hong Kong! YES, I am visiting Michael in Hong Kong over the vacation! I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks, and finally I’m here (arrived this afternoon). I will be posting pictures of our adventures this week as Michael gives me a glimpse of his life here at HKU.

Anyway, back to the cake. It was Megan’s Birthday yesterday and I really wanted to make something special for her. That, and the goal that I made for myself this year was persuasion enough for me to stay up until 2:30 am Thursday night baking this cake. I was exhausted Friday and although I don’t know how that affected my performance on the 3 exams I had that day, in the end I felt quite “accomplished.” You can find the recipe for both the cake and icing at sweetapolita, an amazing cake baker’s blog (I substituted the white chocolate icing for swiss meringue buttercream but you can find recipes for both on this blog).

I experimented with photoshop for a while, toying with these photos, so don’t be surprised if there are different styles of editing below!

<Cake Challenge Series: is a collection of posts which document the cakes I bake each month. More specifically, I have a goal this year to bake at least one (hopefully spectacular) layer cake each month, and photograph/post them here. I hope you enjoy this collection as much as I enjoy baking these delicious desserts!>

Check out January and February’s cakes too!