Red Fruit Shortcake

A lovely genoise cake with fresh strawberries and raspberries, the Red Fruit Shortcake is a splendid way to celebrate berry season.

The HCB baked this cake in May, but as raspberries weren't fresh yet I decided to hold off. Today at the grocery store and the farmer's market I discovered berry season was in full swing--strawberries, raspberries both red and white, blueberries, marionberries! The time has come, I thought, for Red Fruit Shortcake.

(This week, the HCB are baking the Coffee Chiffonlets, which I baked in April 2010, and met Rose and Woody!)

July 21, 2011
Name of Cake: Berries!
Occasion: HCB
Constituents: one 9 inch layer golden genoise, center hollowed out and filled with macerated strawberries and raspberries

This really wasn't much of a new cake by this point. The cake recipe comes from another cake in the book; making a sugar syrup and adding alcohol is old hat now. I didn't do the best job macerating the fruit without destroying the raspberries. They were too soft and I was too manhandly. (I'm making manhandly a word.)

The new skill I learned was how to cut out a depression in the top of the cake so that one could nestle in a bunch of juicy berries. I bet this would work equally well with juicy stone fruit too. Cutting the depression was really easy; the genoise so accommodating that it was no trouble to gently scrape up the cake. I saved all the scraped up cake for a snack.

After syruping the cake with a tuaca-berry juice simple syrup, the macerated berries are tumbled into their cake-bowl. And that's pretty much all there is to this cake.

I brought the cake to work where coworkers and patients alike enjoyed it. The genoise makes a lovely spongy layer to soak up the juicy berries, and provide a very light stage for the fruit to shine. Delicious. Summery. Divine.