Can you believe it’s already September?! Before this summer started, I was excited for the summer sun to beam down on me, cute summer activities appropriate for warm weather, beach days, long days, late nights, BUT IN A BLINK OF AN EYE, it is now September and I barely got to do any of those. Hot girl summer has become sad girl September. Don’t get me wrong, I am plenty excited for Autumn, pumpkin spice lattes, my birthday, etc — I just don’t feel ready to say goodbye to summer just yet.

So, as I do with every occasion, I made a cake. Whenever I am in need of comfort, I usually go straight to chocolate cake, hazelnuts, caramels, deep cocoa-y, coffee, nutty comforting flavours, but it just didn’t feel appropriate to do so with a summer cake. SO HERE IT IS, a lemony cake with strawberries, lemon curd. I really feel like I had to force myself out of my comfort zone for the sake of opening my mind and moving myself out of routines — CHANGING THINGS UP ARE GOOD FOR YOUR PERSONAL GROWTH!! To be quite honest, forcing myself out of this comfort zone was slightly stressful, but in the end I was left with a super delicious cake that I stress-ate.

If I could go back and change up this cake a little more, I definitely would have switched out the strawberries for raspberries, added pieces of peaches into the cake (if I had found the peaches earlier), and maybe have added a mango white chocolate ganache drip along the side of the cake. This is definitely Summer’s Over Cake V2.0 ideas in the making. Stay tuned to see more next year. This cake is definitely not hard to recreate, and I have a full video tutorial on my Youtube channel @ ally bakes, or down below at the bottom of this blog post.

For the mango buttercream, I made a batch of my Italian meringue buttercream and took 227 (1 cup) of mango nectar, and reduced it down in a saucepan over medium heat until there was about 1/4 cup of liquid left. The more you reduce it, the better, because the more liquid you add into buttercream the more it becomes a bad idea. Liquid + fat don’t mix unless emulsified, and the egg whites can only emulsify so much in buttercream.

Strawberry Jam Recipe
Lemon Curd Recipe