Yellow Butter Cake with Quick Buttercream Frosting

For my friend Megan's birthday, I made her a Yellow Butter Cake with fresh Strawberries and vanilla buttercream frosting. I cannot believe this cake looked as good as it did when I was finished because the process was fraught with near disasters. This is a dense cake and I could definitely notice this in the batter. I filled the two cake pans a little too full and watched as they rose over the top of the cake pans...this made my baking time a bit longer and I was afraid they would be dry in parts and not done in the middle. The cake finished baking and I let them sit for a few minutes before attempting to remove them from the pans. It was not as clean of a transition as I am used to and the fact that the cake pan gets wider at the top does not help matters. The cake sides were a bit crumbly and I hurriedly cut them, sealed them in syran wrap and put them in the freezer while I cut the berries and made the frosting.

Has anyone heard of Mascerated Strawberries? It does not sound as good as it really is!!! My cookbook suggested pairing this cake with mascerated strawberries and a vanilla buttercream frosting and it had a picture to die for!!! I could not find any mention in the cookbook on what I needed to mix with or do to the strawberries so I looked online and got to work!! I mixed 1/4 c Triple Sec and 1/4 c sugar with a bowl full of cut strawberries and an hour later when I could not wait any longer, I started assembling the cake using these delicious strawberries...they were good!!

The title of the frosting was Quick Buttercream, but I had to make a pastry cream base and put it in the fridge for a half hour...QUICK??? And then I had to cream the butter for 10 minutes. I can definitely drive to the store and get a few tubs of frosting faster than make this frosting, but in the end, I loved this frosting!!! And once I creamed the butter, the rest of the recipe came together fairly Quick. I also use the Italian buttercream recipe from this cookbook and I always stress out because you have to cook it than add the hot syrup to the egg mixture and completely cool it before adding the butter and the hopefully after the mixer runs for ten minutes, frosting forms. This recipe i can see results before I start to panic!! That is a good thing in my world! As I mentioned earlier, I had to make a pastry cream base and let it cool. This was a similar recipe to the pastry cream in the fruit tart, but I whisked away from the beginning and it had a smoother consistency than my last attempt but after it cooled it was a solid consistency rather than my (again)anticipation that it would be more like pudding. Do I just have a false sense of what it should be like or am I cooking it too long???