French Strawberry Cake

Finally, a seasonal recipe! I mostly used my strawberries from our CSA, but had to supplement with some from the grocery store at the last minute. Also used some eggs from KEG.


I'm not a baker, I don't know what Genoise is, and I don't think it's what I made. Julia put the time at 4 -5 minutes before the egg & sugar mixture was whipped to the proper consistency. Mine was more like 15 minutes... or at least I stopped counting at that point. All I know is that I hate sifting flour, but I did it twice for this recipe.... and it still didn't turn out properly.

I do however want to point out that I love these Mario Batali prep bowls my brother and his girlfriend got us. That way I didn't have to stand there hovering with 1 teaspoon of vanilla for the "final moments" of whipping, unable to put it down. I could just stick it in this bowl and do dishes while it took FOREVER to whip.

So obviously I did something wrong is this is my cake that I'm supposed to cut in three:


I'm not sure if the scale comes across in that picture, but it's about an inch high. I have a problem with the direction of "fold". I don't really understand what that means. Especially with this mixture, since it was mostly like foam, which would hide giant pockets of flour that I wasn't aware of until I tried to stir in the butter.

I did manage to somehow cut that cake in half.


And now behold, the world's ugliest cake:




I didn't even bother with the rosettes and decorating directions. At the point of decorating it was obvious this was a little beyond saving. It tasted as good as ugly cake and cream and strawberries could. Which is to say, amazing!