Chocolate Cake with Strawberry Buttercream

I love baking cakes and don’t do it often enough. Artfully crafted, beautifully photographed cakes always catch my eye on Pinterest (especially multi-layer naked cakes with flowers on top). I’ve attempted the naked cake once before (seen here), but I wanted to give the decorating aspect another try. To make this Valentine’s Day cake, I used two triple chocolate cake mixes to make three 8-inch layers. I’m all about baking from scratch, but in this case I didn’t want to waste all of the ingredients if my decorating didn’t turn out to be blog-worthy. However, I did make the buttercream from scratch using this recipe (although I pretty much doubled the amount of powdered sugar used). The fresh strawberry purée gives it the perfect flavor and color. Then I topped it with these L-O-V-E letters, which we had on top of the cutting cake at our wedding (you can see pics here!). Since Rob and I don’t need to eat an entire cake, I brought most of it to work and it was a hit! I think it looks and tastes great!

P.S. Check out this post for the tassel garland tutorial!