From birthdays to weddings, this is the ultimate cake.

Byline: HOME COOKING By Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

Entertaining is Monica Deluca's specialty, and a recipe for Strawberry-Carrot Cake is one that's proved to be a favorite of both her guests and her family.

"I made this cake for our last group get-together and it was like to die for," Deluca said. "It was a weekend with a lot of things going on and I wanted to make a really good dessert but I didn't have time to really spend a whole day."

This simple-to-make carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and sliced fresh strawberries solved her dilemma. It's a recipe from Longhi's restaurant on the island of Maui, Hawaii.

"It's like something out of a bakery," she said of the cake. "It's so good."

Deluca's children are not big eaters of sweets, she said, but her son has requested the cake for his 18th birthday and her daughter, a sophomore in high school, says she'd like it for her wedding cake when she gets married.

"It's like the cake!" Deluca said.

When invited to visit friends Gina and Phil Sholian in Portland over the July 4 holiday, Deluca decided to take champagne and to make a Strawberry-Carrot Cake for the couple's anniversary. The couple had just returned from Hawaii.

"So we were slicing it up and Gina starts to tell me about this wonderful cake that she had in Lahaina at this restaurant called Longhi's - it was a Strawberry-Carrot Cake," Deluca said. "And I started laughing, because I'm slicing it up and I said, 'Gina, this is the cake!' ... I thought that was so weird, because I just got this book (Longhi's cookbook) like three months ago. So it's the cake!"

Deluca describes her occupation as "domestic engineer." She is married to Peter Deluca, who manages the automotive paint division at Industrial Finishes, and is the mother of two sons and a daughter. In addition, she operates a part-time hair salon.

How she began cooking: "I actually started cooking in the fourth grade ... I was interested because both my grandmothers were great cooks and I loved watching them cook."

Deluca said her parents built a house when she was in the fourth grade that had an extra kitchen in the basement for entertaining.

"So that was my kitchen," she said. "I deemed that my kitchen. I started baking cookies and doing all kinds of my own thing. My mom wasn't a huge cook ... but I loved it."

Her biggest cooking success: "It's a Mediterranean prosciutto-wrapped swordfish. I got (the recipe) off Tyler Florence" of the Food Network.

Deluca said she prepared the swordfish, which was served on a bed of fennel slaw, for an informal gourmet group that gets together for a jointly prepared meal about four times a year.

The recipe calls for a loin of swordfish, so she ordered 10 pounds from Newman's Fish Co. and found, when she picked up her order, that she had been given two pieces that looked like huge roasts.

"It did not look like what Tyler was doing on the show because he had loins, like pork tenderloin," she said. "They were so big, I decided to cut them in half, so I had these four mini-roasts. I got them all wrapped with prosciutto. The recipe is you sear them and then you bake them off in the oven. But just looking at it, I realized I had way more than what I needed for the 10 or 12 people. So I ended up just doing three of them and freezing the other."

But she had never cooked such big pieces of fish before and didn't want to ruin $131 worth of swordfish.

"So I called Newman's and asked, 'What do you think the internal temperature should be?' '

About 165 degrees, she was told.

"So at 155, I checked it and I could tell it was done just by the touch," she said. "So I took it out, presented it, and it was perfect. And I was so excited because I had never cooked a big hunk of fish like that."

The dish got rave reviews, she said.

Her biggest cooking failure: "The one thing that comes to my mind was when I first bought my Cuisinart (food processor). I was 22. I bought every vegetable known to man and sliced them all, because I had to use my new slicer in my Cuisinart," she said.

A person who doesn't waste food, she decided to bake the vegetables layered in a baking dish.

"It was disgusting," she said, and then corrected herself. "I was just trying to be ultra, ultra creative. It wasn't disgusting necessarily, but it just wasn't something I would serve to anybody."

Her favorite cookbooks: "The Hand Me Down Cookbook," recipes collected by Eleanor Evans, was one of her first cookbooks.

"It was one I cooked a lot out of as a single person and one that I cooked a lot out of as a mom. It's homey," she said.

Other favorites include "Heart of the Home: Notes from a Vineyard Kitchen" by Susan Branch, "Simply French: Patricia Wells Presents the Cuisine of Joel Robuchon," and "Caprial's Bistro Style Cuisine" by Caprial Pence.

Strawberry-Carrot Cake

For the cake:

2 cups sugar

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 eggs

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda 

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

2 cups grated carrots

For the icing:

4 cups powdered sugar

1/4 cup hot water

1/4 cup sweet butter, at room temperature

1/4 cup shortening

1 pound cream cheese

2 pints strawberries, thinly sliced

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

To make the cake, mix the sugar, oil and eggs together. Add the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder and carrots. Mix until just incorporated with no lumps. Grease a 10-inch cake pan and fill with batter. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes until firm. Let cool, unmold from pan, and refrigerate.

To make the icing, put the powdered sugar in a bowl and add hot water slowly, mixing until smooth. Mix in the butter, then add the shortening and blend. Add the icing to the cream cheese in three stages, scraping the bowl to keep the mixture smooth.

Cut the cake into three layers. Ice each of the bottom two layers with 1/4 inch of cream cheese icing and top with 6 sliced strawberries. Assemble the two layers and add the top layer. Ice the entire cake with cream cheese icing, starting with the top and then the sides. Top the cake with sliced strawberries.

Source: "Longhi's: Recipes and Reflections from Maui's Most Opinionated Restauranteur" by Bob Longhi and Gabrielle Longhi (Ten Speed Press).

To nominate a cook for this feature, mail to Home Cooking, P.O. Box 10188, Eugene, OR 97440; fax [phone]; contact Jim Boyd at 338-2363, or [phone]; or e-mail jboyd@guardnet .com. Include the nominee's name and phone number, your name and phone number, and why you think he or she is an interesting cook.