Summer fruit cake?

Birthday cakes for me are a labor of love and have been since I was a teenager.  I loved shaped cakes.  I loved frosted cakes.  I had a whole collection of tips and bags and I could make quite respectable frosting roses.  Back in the day, this was my birthday bible:
   

Cut ahead to today. As incredible as it may seem, I married a man who doesn't like frosting.  At all.

So, since marrying him almost seven years ago, I have gotten creative with his birthday cakes in a different way.

This year, we had a bumper crop of rhubarb and strawberries in our new garden.  While my love does not like frosting, he does enjoy a good upside down cake and also a good shortcake.  Since I am crazy, I thought it would be fun to do both.  In the cookbook below is a really good recipe for Rhubarb Upside Down Cake.  It's delicious and simple, but not particularly pretty, which made me sad.  So, I sliced up a bunch of our strawberries and threw those on.  Then I 1.5 c of whipping cream with 1.5 T of vanilla instant pudding mix and slathered that on the strawberries.  The result was amazing.  The cake was not too sweet and syrup-y, as upside down cakes have a tendency to be and the strawberries complemented the cake nicely.  The whipped cream added a subtle vanilla flavor that topped it all off nicely.  No ice cream was necessary.


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