Secret Recipe: Strawberry cake with Brown Butter and Candy Cap Buttercream

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Mushrooms and Strawberries? Yes, it sounds like an odd combination, but you’ll just have to trust me. Strawberries pair incredibly well with butter - especially the caramel, toasty flavors of browned butter. And candycap mushrooms taste intensely of maple, which rounds out the combination to absolute perfection. Plus your guests will never guess the secret ingredient that makes this cake so dang delicious! Well, unless you decorate it with marzipan mushrooms like I did. ;) 

Like a lot of my favorite ideas, this cake came to be from the seemingly-random bumping together of multiple thoughts in my brain. I’d seen one of my friend Must Love Herb’s stunning and whimsical cakes decorated with a combination of real and marzipan mushrooms, so that was floating around in my mind… then I went to work in the local garden and found some cute little mushrooms growing amongst the first strawberries of the year. Something clicked. But don’t worry, I didn’t use the random garden mushrooms (which are most likely not edible), instead I used the last of my stash of candycap mushrooms foraged in the magical woods of the Pacific Northwest last winter! When fresh, these members of the lactarius family are slightly orange and “bleed” a milky latex when cut. They can be difficult to distinguish from other inedible varieties, so make sure you learn from (or buy from) a trusted expert! But once dry, these mushrooms are a WORLD apart… they take on the most delightful rich maple fragrance that is POWERFUL. Even double-bagged and sealed in a glass jar, they perfume my whole herbs cabinet! After grinding them in my spice grinder, I smelled delightfully of maple and woods for the rest of the day. Hmm, maybe my next project with them should be some kind of bodycare product…

ANYWAYS, this cake was a big hit with my fiance and I think you will love it too!

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