Strawberry Cream Cake Filled with French pastry cream, topped with fresh local berries, and decorated with a garland of whipped cream.
A Great Recipe when Local Strawberries are in Season
Here's a wonderful dessert to make now, during local strawberry season, where you’ll find farmers markets to be gold mines of succulent and perfectly ripe strawberries. Local berries are so tender and sweet and red all the way through with no crunchy cores. They also tend to be a lot smaller than commercial berries and are perfectly sized to arrange whole on top of this cake. Some supermarkets do sell organic strawberries from out of state that come mighty close in size to local berries, so do keep them in mind as an option. The cake I make for this dessert is a hot milk sponge, and it goes back at least to the nineteenth century. I can’t explain why, but the hot melted butter and milk that you beat into the batter at the last minute make for a light-textured cake with a tight crumb that melts in the mouth. You can bake the cake a day ahead and hold it, well-wrapped, at room temperature.
French pastry cream cooked, cooled, and ready to fill and top the cake.
French Pastry Cream can be Used for Cake and Eclairs.
The pastry cream, which acts as a filling and topping for the cake, is classically French and usually serves as a filling for éclairs. You can make that, too, a day ahead, and refrigerate it. Assembling the dessert then is a simple matter of putting cake, pastry cream, and berries together. A whipped cream decoration is all that remains and that can be as fancy or plain as you wish. So make this glorious cake on any day soon when fresh, perfectly sweet and juicy strawberries come your way.