Strawberry Cream Cake

In my Menu Plan..Tuesday? comments section, Christa (great name, btw), asked for an update on my attempt to make a Strawberry Cream Cake from America's Test Kitchen. I am pleased to say I made it last night and it was mostly a success! I saw mostly because well.......


I think the cake fell. The recipe requires cutting the cake into three layers. This looked much too small for that. It tasted pretty good, but Ben noted, perhaps, it was too dense. It was, however, edible, so I count that as pretty good!


My greatest success was whipping my own cream. And yes, I did it by hand. Apparently, I am crazy! I don't have an electric mixer, so I really hoped it would work. It took forever (20 minutes?), but I did it and it tasted really good. The achievement was worth the effort!

So, here is the end result of the cake. As you can see, I did cut it into three, pretty thin, and very uneven layers! But, the strawberry sauce made the layers moist, the cream held up, and my guests said they liked it!

And to show my imperfections....the back of the cake, where the berry sauce leaked out. :-)

My verdict? This was a lot of work, but it was good enough that I will try this again during strawberry season next year. I need to perfect the cake, but if I do, perhaps this will become an annual staple. If anything, I am no longer intimidated by the thought of making my own whipped cream....I will invest in/borrow an electric beater next time, though.