Strawberry Cake with Crumbs

This recipe and these photos have been waiting publication for over a month and I'm finally finding a couple of minutes to upload and write down the recipe.

I've already made this cake repeatedly, only a couple of days ago I tried a new version with chocolate chips in it - the best according to my taste, and it is recently one of the preferred cakes in our family.

What makes it so unique is the perfect combination of fresh fruit, sponge cake and buttery crumbs on top, but I should add, that it also works with frozen fruit - not as juicy, but still quite good.

Ingredients:

For the sponge cake:

• 2 eggs
• 100 g sugar
• 80 g vegetable (sunflower) oil
• 120 g milk
• 200 g flour
• 10 g baking powder

For the crumbs: 

• 30 g butter
• 2 table spoons flour
• 2 table spoons sugar

Preparation:

Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the oil and milk, mix. Sift and add the four with the baking powder and a pinch of salt. I also add vanilla.

Pour the batter into your baking dish. Half the strawberries and arrange on top. 

To prepare the crumbs, grate the cold butter and mix it with the flour and the sugar, until you get buttery crumbs. Spread them on top of the cake.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for approx. 20 min. Serve with tea or coffee, best in the morning with your Duolingo lessons :)

These can also be made into muffins, if you don't mind the additional work :)

Baking

Yesterday I had already made some rice pudding for dessert, when I read the recipe for banana cup-cakes Kepanie published on Knitspiring Odyssey.

Wow, these cup-cakes are something! So airy, so fluffy and they just melt in the mouth, and the taste of bananas is so strong. This is the first time I'm using milk with vinegar and I admit I had to ask in my favourite cooking forum if the recipe was OK, as I had never encountered this method of rising the patty.

The recipe yields two dozens of cup-cakes. My modifications - I used dairy butter instead of shortening and I added less that a full second cup of flour - I stopped adding the flour when the texture of the patty was dense enough, so my flour was about 1/3 of the second cup less that the recipe stipulates. If you're a cup-cake fan, definitely go check that recipe :)

And today I made these Japanese rolls with butter. The original recipe was published in a Japanese cooking site, I saw it interpreted in my favourite Bulgarian cooking forum - labrex is my cooking guru again. However I deviated a bit from the recipe, adding milk and egg to the dough for richer taste and omitting the garlic, as I have a very strong aversion to it (though I'm sure I'm not a vampire lol :))
Ingredients: 400 g flour, 100 ml milk, 150 ml water, 1 egg, 20 ml olive oil with rosemary, 7 g dry yeast, 1 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, dry savory and dry basil.

Mix the ingredients and make dough. Cut and form into 8 rolls. Place on a baking tin, cover with a cloth and let the dough rise.

After the rolls have doubled their volume, make a cut in each roll and place a strip of butter (if you like garlic, you can use garlic flavoured butter).

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C. Serve warm with cheese and tomato salad, butter and mixed spices or any other way you prefer fresh bread.

I must start jogging or something, I'm gaining weight with all that baking :)))