Steven’s birthday and Mother’s Day today, resulting in efficiency or someone being “screwed,” and I would say that this is Steven, since he has to share his special day with a lesser event. He requested some sort of pound cake so I made that with strawberries and whipped cream. I gave the cake a tie-dye glaze, in honor of Steve’s childhood in the 60’s and 70’s. This is easy. You need: food coloring kit; lemon juice; confectioner’s sugar; 6 glass custard cups (or other cups that won’t absorb the colors); a fully cooled pound cake. Place your cake on a large piece of foil or a sheet pan. Mix 2 cups of confectioner’s sugar with a little lemon juice. Add more lemon juice until you have a very thick glaze. If the glaze is too thin it will dry transparently on the cake and all this will have been for naught. Divide your glaze evenly among the custard cups. Make red, yellow, blue and green, which are the colors that come with basic food coloring sets, by adding a couple of drops of color to each cup of glaze and then mixing with a teaspoon. Make orange with some red and yellow. Make purple (and this is a must) from red and green. Using a clean spoon, spoon the purple glaze on the top of the cake, at intervals, so it runs down both sides and so you wind up with four or five strips of purple. Do this with the other colors, one at a time, on the clean parts of the cake, overlapping now and again for a tie-dye effect. Allow icing to harden completely before moving. Cakes like this are good served with basic strawberry topping, which you can make by washing, stemming and cutting up strawberries (to your liking, i.e., sliced or quartered), and tossing with a good dose of sugar and a few drops of lemon juice. Cover with plastic wrap, pop in fridge, and in a few hours you’ll have strawberries in syrup to serve over cake slices. The cake and fixin’s were a big hit – especially with Berry, who kept a close eye on the operation.
