Tuesdays With Dorie : French Strawberry Cake

Our new recipe with Tuesdays With Dorie is French Strawberry Cake.. I have had my eye on this recipe since I got my book.. It looked so simple, elegant and tasty to me.. It is tasty and elegant and all but not as simple as it looks.. At least wasn't for me..

My version of French Strawberry Cake on the cake stand I made at my pottery class.. 

It starts with making the Genoise that will be the base for the cake.. The ingredients are very straight forward: just eggs, cake flour, sugar, vanilla extract and butter.. There is no leavening agent as you can see, so the cake gets its height from whisking whole eggs and sugar for a long time until the mixture triples its size.. My Genoise batter was doing fine until I added the butter, and then it collapsed.. I hoped for the best that it would raise again in the oven, but NO.. It stayed flat and sad.. It was max 1 inch tall.. My husband asked me if this was the first layer of my three layer cake :)) It looked impossible to divide to three layers.. I will give Genoise another chance in the future, hoping that I will do better with the folding in the second round..

Secondly, I cleaned and sliced my strawberries, and mixed them with sugar (I used 1/4 cup of sugar), and left at room temperature to become mushy and delicious.. This is the filling for the layers, together with the whipped cream..

Then comes the whipped cream.. It was very easy to prepare and very tasty.. Just sweet enough, with beautiful vanilla scent..

Oh, it was a challenge to divide my skinny cake into layers.. First, I decided I will go with only 2 layers.. When I tried to cut it in the middle, I ended up with such a skinny layer that I decided I will go for 3 layers.. Well, top layer was like a paper and middle layer's 1/8 does not exist :)..

Anyways, with this disaster behind me, I filled the layers with strawberries and whipped cream, and tried to do my best for icing the cake.. Which wasn't easy with my uneven layers.. So, I decided to cover them all with chopped pistachios, because it would cover the imperfections and because I love the taste and color of pistachios.. I think they add a festive look to any dessert..

After my cake waited two hours in the fridge, I took these pictures and tasted.. It is light and delicious, perfect summer dessert.. Unfortunately, my Genoise was not only skinny, the bottom layer was very dense as well.. I will definitely try to tackle Genoise recipe again, and hopefully will succeed the second time..

As a conclusion, I like how this recipe tasted and that it is so open to variations.. You can use another simple/dry cake recipe as a base, or other fruits of your liking, and the whipped cream recipe is so versatile and can be used with variety of desserts.. At the end of all my struggles, the sliced cake does not look so bad :) Bon appetit to us!

Looks better than expected :)

For the recipe please visit blogs of this week's hosts, Sophia and Allison : Sophia's Sweets and Think, Love, Sleep, Dine, or buy the book: Baking with Julia..

There will be three recipes in July.. All look delicious.. Stay tuned..

Thanks for stopping by..