This is strawberry shortcake presented in a beautiful cake.  I must admit that I was a bit intimidated by this recipe.  But it really wasn’t as hard as it sounded.  You start with the Genoise cake.  This was the first time I ever attempted a Genoise cake.  The actual steps aren’t hard, it just tricky folding in the flour.  I was so afraid of deflating the batter, I didn’t fold in the flour quite as well as I should have and as a result the bottom of my cake was a bit tough.   The recipe says to sprinkle the sifted flour over the batter, which I did, sort of.   I read a suggestion, after I had already made mine, that it works better to sift the flour over the batter.   So when I try this again, I will sift the flour into the batter to avoid clumping and will hopefully avoid the tough bottom.  My cake ended up an 1 1/4 inches high.  I cut it into three layers as the was specified in the recipe.

Actually, cutting it into layers went better than I thought it would.  I used the technique that I learned last year, that is to cut about and inch into the cake all the way around, measuring the height of the cut carefully.  Then you have a grove for your knife to follow as you cut through the entire layer.  It works like a charm and produces nice even layers.  The texture of the top two layers was quite nice, but as I said earlier, the bottom layer was tough.  It was still edible, but just not the nice texture that was in the top part of the cake.  Had I realized this while I was putting in the strawberry filling,  I would have added more juice to the bottom layer to soften it up a bit.

The whipped cream frosting was excellent and easier to apply than I had imagined.   Using whipped cream for frosting means that you need to keep the cake refrigerated until it is served.  I had used about a cup and a half of cream instead of the 1 1/4 cups called for, because I had read in the comments that some had run out of whipped cream.   In my opinion, running out of whipped cream would have been a tragedy!  I had plenty with the added amount and only had enough leftover to top off a cup coffee.  I shared this cake with my friends at the yarn shop and had about a third of the cake left to bring home, where my husband and I finished it off BEFORE dinner, tough bottom layer and all.

The recipe for this delicious cake can be found on page 273 of Baking with Julia.   Our fabulous hosts for this week are Sophia of Sophia’s Sweets and Allison of Sleep Love Think Dine, where you can also find the recipe.  To read about everyone’s adventures baking this cake take a look at the links left in the comments at Tuesdays with Dorie.

P.S. It’s 11:30pm on the West Coast–where it’s still Tuesday!