Strawberried and Multifaceted

Every now and then, I get overzealous when it comes to flavors. I find it so tempting to jam-pack a variety of flavors into a single cake, so long as they're complementary and, well, tasty! Don't get me wrong--I have no complaints when it comes to keeping it simple: rich chocolate cake filled with chocolate mousse, covered in chocolate ganache, piped with chocolate buttercream, decorated with chocolate curls, chocolate chips, and chocolate-covered chocolate... Mm, okay. So I lost the simplicity somewhere in the chocolate (looks like I got Carried away, ha!), but the point is that a cake like that--while heartstoppingly rich--is focused and truly showcases only a single featured ingredient: chocolate.

When Iris gave me the freedom to craft any cake I wanted for her manager's birthday, my imagination ran wild with the possibilities. I had a hard time choosing a single liqueur, ingredient, or flavor to highlight, so I decided to make a cake featuring my most popular flavors to date.

I call this one Little Miss Popular.

Featuring a chocolate whiskey cake made with Jack Daniels Tennessee whiskey (seen here and here), a creamy Bailey's Irish Cream buttercream frosting (seen in the above two links as well as here and here), plenty of crushed pirouette cookie bits (you'll know that I'm a fan of pirouette cookies if you take a gander here and here), and loads of fresh strawberries (which you'll find in just about every other blog post here at Carrie Cakeaway) both inside the cake and sitting prettily on top of it. Don't let this cake's simple exterior fool you--it packs a lot of complex flavors from smoky whiskey to sweet strawberries to creamy Bailey's, as well as a variety of textures, from the dense dark chocolate cake layers to airy buttercream to crispy pirouette wafer bits.
True to her name, Little Miss Popular maintains a fine balancing act without spreading herself too thin (or in this case, having way too much going on in each bite). Excuse me, miss, it's time for your close-up:
And here she is again, taken under different lighting right before delivery:
Don't worry too much about ogling at and even drooling over this beauty. Little Miss Popular here is quite used to that by now.