White Chocolate Cake with Strawberry Butter-cream – and Blogoversary #2 Winner declared!

I was thinking of posting this cake as post #550. After a lot of contemplation, I gave away the honors to the Flourless Clementine Cake and decided to make this the post that will declare the winners of the recently concluded event as a part of the Blogoversary #2. First of all, let me thank everybody who put in an effort to participate and make this event a fair success. A “thank you” also goes to those who have wished me well for the event, as well as those who wanted to participate but couldn’t make it due to various reasons. Life is such that we may decide on something but not necessarily they turn out to be the way we want or the way we were looking to. There was one thing that this event helped me with – it allowed to revisit a few of my old posts. I noticed a remarkable difference in my language and the mood in which I used to post. Yes, in a lot of ways, 2013 was a much better year than 2014, however I learned and matured much as an individual in 2014. Going through the posts made me nostalgic, more than anything made me realize that we should not take anybody in our life for granted. This holds true especially in the case of our near ones – our parents, siblings, spouse, kids… We should always remind ourselves that death is not the only way that we can be separated from our loved ones, there are matters much bigger than that – our egos, our expectations, our frustrations, our misunderstandings… Many of us don’t realise this unless we lose all or a part of our important relationships…

Anyway, not dwelling much over the hard learned lessons… 🙂 Let’s go into the main part! As per the rule of the event, the first and the most important one was to try a recipe from the blog and post it on the FB page with tags of five people. So who all had done that, is what you find in this album of all the tried and tasted – thank you for all the wonderful feedback! This is what keeps food bloggers like us fully motivated. For all of them who participated as per the completion of all the event rules, the winner selected using the Rafflecopter is NILOUFER RIYAZ!!! Congratulations, dear… will get in touch with you, so that we can look into how we can arrange the beautiful baking set from “The Cooking Doctor” and enjoy baking in them! 🙂

For all your lovely readers, today I am sharing the cake I baked for Azza’s birthday last month. We never celebrate birthdays as it is not part of Islamic culture, however just for the reminiscence of the day, I purchase a cake so that we all can enjoy, and of late, consider baking one. I was really excited about doing this cake. Somehow, the cakes I have baked during her last three birthdays were flops! All utter disappointments that struggled to get over… Not that I was 100% satisfied with this cake, but this was a much better attempt and we all really enjoyed the cake. Frosting is not something I like to do because we all prefer just normal snack cakes, however at times it is good to go a bit overboard when the day is for some happiness, right? 🙂 Off to the way I made it… Cake recipe adapted from here