Strawberry mousse cake recipe

Managed to bake a decent cake for my friend's birthday last week. I have used a simple butter cake recipe and incorporated a strawberry mousse layer in between the cake layers, topped it off with some buttercream icing and added a bit of strawberries to achieve that simplistic look.

Ingredients:

Butter cake:
3 eggs
320g self-raising flour
118g butter
90g sugar
Vanilla essence

Simple syrup
60g sugar
80mL water
1 tsp vanilla essence

Strawberry mousse
325g strawberry puree
130g sugar
2.5 tsp gelatin + 3 tbsp water
240g heavy cream 25g sugar

Cream butter and sugar well before adding in eggs and vanilla essence. Fold the mixture into the flour and bake at 150C until set. Once it's nicely baked, drizzle the syrup onto the top of the cake. Allow it to cool before slicing the cake into half and drizzle more syrup onto the cake layers. This prevents it from drying.

I whipped the heavy cream until I obtained soft peaks. Do not overbeat this.

Weigh out appropriate quantities of strawberries before cooking it with the sugar. The strawberries would release water so I wouldnt be too worried if it appears dry. I then pureed the semi-solid chunks of strawberries and place it back into the pan to reduce.

Incorporate the mixture with the whipped cream and allow to set slightly (not too runny). Place one portion of the cake in the cake tin and pour the strawberry mousse before topping it with the final cake layer.

I let the strawberry mousse set overnight and had to smooth out the sides abit as it wasn't as even as I would have liked it to be. Smear your cake with sufficient buttercream and top it with fresh strawberries. Done!