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I don't care if you watch us or not. That's my I don't want people here who don't want to be here. Keep going. Scroll. I'm not trying to make anyone do what they don't want to do. I am anti- algorithm. Every year I make some variation on a strawberry cake. Mostly cuz my sister's birthday is in July and like it's her favorite thing in the world. And so this is 2026's strawberry cake. It's always the same variation on like sponge cake, cream, and berries. And this year, I think I've made like my most special showstopping version yet. It's similar to a French cake called a fresier, but it's like a really simple strawberry cake with fresh strawberries. And I put a full 2 lb of strawberries in
this cake. It's so pretty. It's kind of a lot of work, but it's worth it. Doo. Dessert person. Hi everyone. I'm Claire Saffitz. Welcome to my home kitchen. So I've made the cake called a fres. Like fres is French for strawberry. And it has like a ring of strawberries around the sides and like a layer cake and it's kind of suspended in this cream. So like that combination to me that's what I want in a strawberry cake. It's like a light sponge, light cream, and fresh strawberries. I really prefer a fresh strawberry over a baked one. Not that can't be good, but it's just a
different thing. And my sister's birthday is in July, and like often we're together with the whole family, and she loves this combination also. And so, this one is my version for this year. It is a cake that is covered in a single layer of sliced strawberries that almost look like mosaic, like they've been tiled. So, there's three main components to the entire thing. There's the sponge cake, the strawberries themselves, and the cream. So, if you've if you watch Dessert Person like all the time, you might you'll have recognized these components cuz these are all things I made before. So, the sponge is kind of like a basically genuis that I've made for my creme caramel cake if you want to
check out that episode. The filling is called a diplomat cream, which is the filling that I use in my um Boston cream pie layer cake. So, check out that video. So, it's like they're they're all components, the kind of components that you would use over and over again in different desserts like this, layered desserts, but really the star are the strawberries. I'm doing this recipe now because by the time it comes out, they'll be like abundant strawberries, but truly in the Northeast, we are like one week out from having the real local strawberries. So, these are supermarket berries, and I did my best to pick out the nicest ones. So, like this cake, it's going to be delicious, but it's
would be truly 10 times better if I made it with like the beautiful local strawberries that are like tiny and red all the way through and all that. But these will be just fine. For this sponge, and there's a lot of like doubling up between the two, the components. So, for the sponge, I have it's a whole egg sponge. So, six eggs, sugar, pinch of salt, allpurpose flour, some melted and cooled butter, and vanilla extract. I'm just going to use paste cuz I'm going to use it in the filling. Also, I have 2 lbs of ripe strawberries. With the strawberries, I'm going to add a little gram marier. I'm going to add a little more vanilla, a little hit of lemon, and a little extra sugar. I actually don't have that out,
but I'll throw a little sugar on there, too. For the filling, the diplomat cream. And diplomac cream is a pastry cream that is set with gelatin and lightened with whipped cream. So, it's stable but super light, which makes it so good. So, I have two cups of milk, a cup of heavy cream, more sugar, butter, five egg yolks, 1/4 cup of cornstarch, a teaspoon of gelatin, and just a little bit more salt. Equipment. You'll This is This cake's a lot. Like, you need a lot of stuff. I'm going to use a stand mixer. I have the whisk attachment. A little mesh strainer for sifting flour. Behind me, I have several bowls.
You'll need a bunch of bowls for this. A saucepan. I'm using the maiden sauier which has like the curved sides which is really good for cooking pastry cream. And then importantly I have a 9 in pan with high sides and a removable bottom. You could use a spring form but the high sides is really important. So we're going to use this to bake our sponge. And then we're going to assemble everything in here. And you'll need some plastic wrap or like acetate, food grade acetate if you have that for assembling the cake. Like that's it. That's a lot but that's it. So, the first thing I'm going to do is start with my sponge cake. While the sponge is baking, I'm going to make my pastry cream. So, I'm going to just set
these guys aside. And in the meantime, I'm going to throw a lid on my yolks so they don't form a skin. And I'm going to keep my heavy cream in the fridge cuz that has to stay cold. So, this is a whole egg sponge. One thing I love about sponge cakes that I've said before is you don't have to prep the pan. There's no lining it like it goes into an ungreased unlined pan which I love. The first thing I'm going to do is get some water warming on the stove. And that's because this is a style of sponge where you warm the eggs and sugar together. That helps them to like gain more volume and work more air into them. So, I'm going to use kind of a bamarie is what it's called. So, let me just get that
going on the stove and then I'll bring it over here. I don't need to prep my pan. And the thing that you'll need is either a really large broad spatula or a skimmer. Let me show you that. I didn't I did not mention this in the tools, the equipment. This is called a skimmer. This is going to help us fold this like really large volume of eggs when we add the other ingredients, the flour and the butter. My butter, like I said, is melted and cooled. So, I'm going to grab this bowl and crack my eggs in. Six whole eggs. It's easier if you start with eggs at room temp, although they all they get warm, so it doesn't matter that much. Going to grab my whisk. And now I'm going to add the sugar and the salt.
So there goes the sugar. Just a pinch of salt. So I want to whisk this together. Another reason I like this style of sponge is you don't have to separate the eggs. It's kind of nice to have whole eggs because a lot of times with and I love a I love a chiffon, but you're separating eggs and yolks and having to kind of beat both of them and then it's like if you're using the stand mixer, sometimes you got to clean it. It's just there's something kind of more streamlined almost about this. Okay, I'm going to grab my water. So now I'm going to whisk this by hand. And I have an instant rate thermometer right here. I want to whisk this until the eggs are basically 113 Fahrenheit. And I have my
instant read thermometer right here. So, I've been whisking for a while. It's really hot in here and I'm starting to sweat. I was catching everyone up on Summer House. By catching everyone up, I mean they've never seen it. I've never even heard of it. Okay. But I'm at 113 exactly. It's toggling between 112 and 113 Fahrenheit. So, I had to put this the water back on the stove to heat it up a little bit more. But, it's gotten nice and fluffy, the mixture. It's like I would say doubled in volume, which is what you want. So, now I can pop this into my stand mixer with the whisk attachment. And I'm just going to let this go. I'll kind of gradually increase the speed, starting on kind of
medium low, then medium, medium high, until the eggs, they're going to be super voluminous. They're going to come up to like almost above the whisk attachment. And I want it to be very thick and ribbony. So I'll show you what that looks like. It'll take a couple minutes in the mixer. And I'm going to use this same saucepan for my filling. So I'm going to just drain it and set it aside for later. I'm just about there with the egg texture. You can see it's super thick. And see how slowly it falls off the whisk. This is what you want. So, it's going to make this, when I say ribbon, it's going to basically create this
trail that's going to fall onto itself, and it's going to take a while for it to fully settle back down. So, I'm going to take this out of the mixer. This looks great. I'm going to use this whisk later. So, I'm just going to rinse it and set it aside. And now, we're going to finish our sponge. Just quick side note, I'm using a baking core. I've really gotten into these. I got them for a special cake project a while ago and I use them now a lot for sponge cakes. It's a little metal piece that helps to like bring heat and force it into the center of the cake to help it bake more evenly and to prevent it from falling. So, I have that
right here. So, now I have my flour and I have my strainer. I'm going to sift it over and I'm going to do it in a couple of additions and fold it through with my skimmer. So, I'll show you why I'm using the skimmer. Because the mixer bowl is very tall and deep and it's hard to actually fold with a spatula, the skimmer just like really gets all the way down to the bottom and makes it super easy to lift up and make that folding motion. So now, so I'm doing it in thirds for the most part. Once you have that flour mostly folded in, I'm going to stream in my butter and fold this through. This mixture is super light and the butter is dense, so it does tend to fall to the bottom, so it's better to kind of lightly drizzle it in.
And now I'm going to add some vanilla. I think the recipe calls for extract. I'm using paste just cuz I'm going to use it in a couple different places. And now we want to fold through the butter. You'll notice some deflating because the presence of fat is going to it just causes some of that egg foam to deflate, but that's normal. So, you want to fold that through until everything is well mixed. Going to grab spatula just to scrape everything down. So, you want to work quickly. And my oven is already preheated. It's on 350 now. It's going to go into my pan. And I'm going to try to center that little baking core. And the batter is going to hold it in place. So you don't have to
like worry about it moving around too much. So I'm going to scrape it the full amount of batter. This one cake is going to become the two layers. So I'm just going to kind of settle it down. And now I do hit it. Oh god. Oh my god. I was lifting up the bottom. I do tap it several times on the counter to pop some of the really large bubbles because I like a slightly more uniform texture in the cake. So, I'm just smoothing the surface. This is going to go into my oven. It's going to bake until the top is very golden brown and springy to the touch and risen. So, it's like 25 to 30 minutes. Oh my gosh. Baby proof. So now, while the cake is baking, I'm going to pivot to the filling, which is a diplomat cream, which is pastry cream
with gelatin, which helps to set and stabilize it, plus whipped cream that's folded in. So, right now, we're just going to cook the pastry cream. I have We're going to come over here. So, here I have two tablespoons of cold water. I'm going to sprinkle that gelatin over top because I want to hydrate it. You have to hydrate it before you can melt it. So, I'm going to set this aside. You also always want to use cold water. So, I'm going to set this aside. It's the granules are going to absorb the water and swell and the whole thing is going to kind of solidify. I'm going to set this here. I'm going to get This is two cups of milk. I'm going to get this warming up. To the milk, I'm going to
add like a nice gug of vanilla paste for flavor. I'm going to add pinch of salt. And then in this bowl, I'm going to start to whisk together my egg yolks and my cornstarch and some of my sugar. So about half of the sugar is going to go with my milk mixture. And then the other half I'm going to use to a step called blanching the eggs where I'm going to whip the egg yolks with my starch and sugar. And it's going to make them nice and pale. So I'm going to start doing that. This is five large egg yolks. Get some water in here. All right. Then my the thickener that I'm using like the yolks themselves are thickeners, but you need an additional thickener in order to get the pastry cube to set. So this is 1/4 cup of cornstarch.
And I'm going to start to whisk all this together. Then once it's incorporated, I can whisk more vigorously. And I just want this mixture to get like a little bit pale and a little bit thick. So we're going to take some of our warm milk mixture and we're going to stream this into our yolks. This step is called tempering. It is the process of slowly raising the temperature of the eggs so that they don't cook or scramble. All right. So, it's about 2/3 of the milk mixture into the bowl. This whole thing is going to get whisked back in. And then I like to scrape it out. This bowl that had the yolks, I'm going to save this. This is going to help me in
the next step where I need to cool down the cooked pastry cream. This will just need a rinse a little later on. I cook my pastry cream pretty hot. Basically, you need to bring it up to the to a boiling point. Uh, and I'm whisking constantly. I know it's not going to scorch or overcook in any spots, but just know that it can cook quick. So, you don't want to cook the eggs. What you do want to cook eggs. You don't want to scramble the eggs or curdle anything. So, I'm going to whisk constantly until this comes up to a boil. And right before it reaches that boiling point, it's going to start to
thicken quite a bit from the cornstarch and from the eggs. And this kind of layer of foam on the surface that's going to disappear and it's going to hold the marks of the whisk. So, it's really obvious when it starts to happen. You'll notice. And I have my butter handy. I also have my gelatin which see how it's kind of gone solid. Okay, it's starting to steam. So, almost there. So now it's starting to thicken. You can see that starting to hold those marks of the whisk. Going to turn the heat down a little bit. So if I stop whisking, you'll see it start to bubble. So that's how I know it's at that boiling point. So once I see it's come up to a boil, there's that bubbling under the surface.
I like to go like a good 20 seconds on the heat just to make sure I'm really cooking out all that starch. So here is that pastry cream. Now I am off the heat. I am going to scrape in my gelatin that's hydrated and the heat from the pastry cream is going to melt it and incorporate it. So, this is going to give my filling some setting power. So, that gets whisked in until smooth and then in goes the butter. This butter has been sitting out, so it's pretty room temp. It's better if your butter is cold, and then it helps to cool down your pastry cream at the same time.
Okay. So, you can see how it started to like look a little weird and separated when I added the butter, but just keep whisking and I have this really beautiful smooth, thick pastry cream. We're going to go back over to our station and I'm going to cool it down in an ice bath. So, here I have my cooked pastry cream. The butter and the gelatin have been whisked in. It's like super smooth and luscious and thick. And so, now we need to cool it down. So, I'm going to whisk it over an ice bath. So, I'm going to get this into this metal bowl.
Last night when I was making my swap, cuz this whole cake needs like a long time in the fridge to set. Anything with gelatin has to be cold and it takes a little while for that gelatin to set. So, I made a version last night and I strained the pastry cream, but there was nothing left in my strainer. Like, no cooked bits of egg, no, you know, there's no vanilla beans, so I just I don't need to strain it. If you feel like you scorched the bottom or maybe you overcooked some parts or there's some cooked egg, you can go ahead and strain it. And now I'm going to This is my bowl from where that had the egg in it. I'm going to rinse this out and use this for the bottom of my uh ice bath.
I'm going to run the tap until it's cold. And I'm going to grab some ice from my freezer. So here I have just about a third of the way full with lots of ice and a little water. going to kind of nestle the bowl in. So now what I want to do, and I don't have to sit here and do this constantly, but I want to stir this so that the whole thing cools down. I want this to be cold, like fridge cold. So what you could do is if you have all the time in the world, make this, pour it into a clean bowl, press a layer of plastic directly onto the surface of the pastry cream, stick it in the fridge, let it just cool down naturally in the fridge. But I'm kind of I'm trying to go straight through start to finish. So, we're going to just push
it a little bit and use an ice bath. It's always better to use a metal bowl for an ice bath for the top part because there's going to be better heat transfer. It conducts heat better than glass. Would it also help if it weren't like 85° in here? Yes, it's hot. All right. So, you can see that the pastry cream is starting to thicken. And if you need to, you can check and add more ice. I have a I have an okay amount of ice in here still. All right. By the way, that it's already cold. It's like cooler than room temp, but not quite cold enough. But it's already colder than my than body temp, which is great. So, I'm going to keep stirring
this and kind of set it to the side. Let me check on the sponge cake cuz I think it's done. And I'm going to grab a cooling rack and bring it over. And a really crucial element of making sponge cake is cooling it upside down. You don't do that in every case, but in every case where it's possible, cool it upside down. So, I'm going to immediately invert that pan onto my rack. And because I didn't grease any of the sides, it's not gonna go anywhere. It's gonna stay put. So, I think it's done. I'm gonna pull it out. It's been almost 29 minutes. So, there's the sponge. It's looking really nice.
It's cooked. So, here's what we're going to do. We're going to gently invert it and just let it cool like that. So I have now for the most part I have my two component my two main components more or less done. My sponge needs to cool and the last step for you can see how thick this has gotten because that gelatin is once that gelatin's cold it'll start to set. So I'm going to set this aside. The last step to finishing my filling is to whip some cream and fold it in. I'm not going to do that yet. I'm going to This is now kind of can kind of hang out here and stay cold. This has to cool. I'm going to pivot now to component number three which is my strawberries. I'm going to get those prepped so that I can
start to assemble everything. And by the way, we're going to assemble in the same pan. So, I need this to cool before I can move on. So, for the strawberries, I have two lbs of strawberries. It's a lot of strawberries. Like two of those quartsiz containers. I want to pick out the nicer looking strawberries. And that those are the part that's going to be on the surface of the cake. And any other strawberry, all bits and pieces chopped up. It doesn't matter how they look or what size they are. That's going to go in the center in the filling. So, I'm going through and I'm hulling all of them. When I'm using really, really nice strawberries, I don't even really haul them. I just pull the green part
off. For these, I'm taking out just that little white section in the middle. Half of these strawberries are going to get chopped to go in the cake as the filling. And then the other half are going to get sliced and are going to go be my decoration all the way around. So, I'm going to actually weigh out half. So, I'm going to do just under a pound for the filling. And now that I took the holes off, it'll be even a little bit less. So, let's just see. This is a pound. I picked the nicer, smaller ones because I'm going to slice them and it's going to be like a profile. So, the bigger kind of less nicely shaped ones are going to be the filling. So, I'm going to start just by chopping these up and putting them in my bowl. This doesn't
have to be any particular shape. I just want it to be sort of small enough and thin enough that it's going to lie flat in the cake. But this is really like you could be pretty coarse and rough with the chop. Is no one else watching Widow's Bay? It's really interesting tonally. It's like funny, but it's also kind of horror. What's the premise? It's Matthew Reese plays the mayor of a New England island like little village that he's No, but he's trying to it's like no one's ever heard of it and it's kind of like a little fishing village, but he's trying to make it into the next
Martha's Vineyard and like attract tourism and like people to the island, but the island is like people are like always talking about how it's haunted and he's trying to like say that it's not haunted and then all these things keep happening. It's really good. It's really funny. So, I'm going to get all these berries into my bowl. I'm going to basically marinate these strawberries. I'm going to add a squeeze of lemon. I'm going to use a little gram marier. I just like it. You don't have to add this. You can do a you could do like elderflower lur if you have it. You could totally omit it.
I'm going to now add a little bit of sugar. And the sugar is going to help draw the juices. We're going to use that to soak the sponge. The reason I'm using gram marier is cuz it is like a it's traditional in fres, the French strawberry cake to have like a little liquor or alcohol in it. So, I'm eyeballing the amount of sugar. It also kind of depends on your berries. If they're so sweet, I would just put the tiniest bit. These are not crazy sweet. So, I'm going to just toss these. Oh, and I'm going to add a little tiny bit of vanilla. Like a little hit. So, now I'm going to set these aside and let these the term is merate. And that just means like letting them sit with
sugar. So, the sugar draws out their juices. Okay. So, those are done. And now we're going to slice the remaining strawberries. on some of the small ones, really kind of on all of them, I just pulled off the green part, the little leaves, and I didn't really hold them because I think it's going to make a nicer profile when I slice them. So, I'm just going to start by thinly slicing the strawberries. And there's no right or wrong thickness. You just don't want them too thin, I guess, but it doesn't it's not so important. You're just going to see the cut side. So, I'm slicing them lengthwise. so that you get that strawberry profile like that. So, I'm just going to continue to get all these sliced. I'm just going to lay them out on my cutting
board and then we're pretty set up to start assembly once that cake is cooled. My strawberries are ready. I want to finish my diplomat cream filling and my cake's basically cooled. So, I'm going to grab my 1 cup of heavy cream from the fridge. It's been staying cold. So, I have my whisk in there. This is going to go in. I'm going to whip this. And I want it to be kind of like medium peaks between medium and firm peaks. Okay. So, I think here I have sort of like medium peaks. So, this texture is what you're looking for. And I'm going to 86 this mixer cuz we're done with it. And now, and I don't even really need this bowl.
Okay. I'm going to fold my whipped cream into my pastry cream. So, I'm going to scrape all of it in. It's really easy to tell when everything's combined because the pastry cream is super yellow from the yolks. The whipped cream is pretty white. So, we're just going to fold this until there's no more streaks. So, now our filling is ready to go. Just going to leave it in this bowl. And now I need to unmold the cake because I need the pan. I need to prep the pan. Sorry. I need to now unmold my cake because I need the pan for assembling everything so I can get it off of my rack.
I'll just actually set this here for the layers. Okay. So, I'm going to cut around the sides. You have these nice tall layers. This Well, that's one tall layer. And now I'm going to loosen it from the bottom. And remember, I have that baking core still in there. So I'm going to peel it away from the bottom. There's that baking core that came right out. So I'm going to just set this aside. Set the cake aside for a minute while I clean the pan. And then I'm going to show you how to prep it for assembling everything. This will just take me a minute. I washed the pan, but I didn't dry it. And that's because when I was thinking about this cake, I remembered a great tip that I picked up somewhere. I can't remember where, which is that plastic
wrap sticks to wet surfaces. So, this is I'm going to use plastic wrap to line my pan and to try to make like a nice smooth surface on the bottom and up the sides. So, I'm going to press this down into the pan. And it does immediately cling to the wet surface, which is awesome. So, I'm not getting like loose plastic wrap that's kind of bunching up in spots. And now, I'm just going to put two more little pieces up on the two opposite sides where I don't have any plastic wrap. So, just like a little I'm sort of patching it. So, here's our prepped pan. I'm done with the plastic. I'll just need one final piece to go over the surface. But here we are. Now, I'm going to prep my cake. So, the first thing I want to do
is I'm just going to slice off the thinnest, like shave off a layer, the thinnest possible layer to expose the crumb. So, I'm just taking my serrated knife. I'm keeping it on the rack because the rack kind of helps because it easily spins. And I'm just slicing horizontally and rotating slowly to remove this top layer. This is ultimately going to get separated into two cake layers. So, let's take off this layer. Now, I'm going to cut it in half by making this top layer that's just a little bit thinner so that I have room on the second layer to remove the other side. So, it's about like an half to a 3/4 inch thick layer. And here, what I do is I make a line for
myself all the way around. Kind of keeping my eye on it so I know that I'm slicing. I'm keeping the thickness consistent. And then once I'm all the way around and I have I've set my line, I can just slice through. I want to buy like a proper knife for splitting cake layers cuz I don't really have one that's long enough. So, there's my first layer. I'm going to take my second layer and I'm going to flip it over and remove that bottom layer. Some of it already came off. With sponge cake, you get this like film. So, I don't even really think I need to slice it off. I'm just going to kind of peel back the skin. Now, the last thing to prep our cake layers is to trim them all the way around. So, if
I were to put these back in the pan, they would basically fill the pan. there would be maybe a very slight gap between the cake and the pan, but I need a larger gap. So, I'm going to basically cut down and around the edge, the sides. Show you. And this is not really precise. And I'm just going to cut at like a straight edge. And I'm going to kind of shave off about a quarter inch of the cake all the way around. That's going to give me a little bit of a gap between the cake and the side of the pan so that I have room for my decorative strawberry layer. My decorative layer, but also my It's not just decorative.
It's very delicious to have those extra strawberries all over. So, this layer is done. Going to set it aside. Do the second layer. These are snacks. You might have, depending on how you assemble yours, you might have a little bit of the filling left over. So, that's what I had last night and I ate it with the cake scraps. It was delicious. So, let me set this aside. Those are our layers. We're going to start building everything. I'm going to start by laying down a layer of my sliced strawberries.
I want it to be kind of random and like interesting and like your eye isn't focusing on any particular area. I don't want it to look so intentionally placed. I've done the bottom layer. You can see what it looks like. I'm going to do one layer around the sides because if I were to do two layers, that top layer is going to like flip flop right off. the first layer can will stick and like adhere. And it's only by adding the filling and creating like that pressure against the sides that then I can add the second layer up the side.
This is kind of the principle of like it that the wet pan like the plastic sticks to the wet pan. The wet strawberries kind of stick to the plastic. All right. Some of these smaller slices I actually can get them to like stick up the sides. So I'm kind of fitting them in. And basically there's no overlapping. So there's no overlapping and I'm minimizing gaps just to get everything placed. So now I'm building a second layer cuz there the smaller slices are staying in place pretty well. So before I finish that top layer because I'm not quite sure how tall I'm going to have to go. I'm going to start to build everything else. Although this is
looking really good. I'm more confident having made one last night. Time to build. I'm going to start by dolloping some of the filling into the bottom. Maybe a cup or so of the filling I dolloped into the center. Just using the back of a spoon to spread it over the strawberries and kind of focusing on pushing the filling into those little gaps in between all the slices. And now I'm going to add a little bit more. And this time I want to work it a little bit of the ways up the sides. Basically what I want is a thin layer of this diplomat cream in between the sliced strawberries and every other part of the cake.
So I'm going to kind of work it up the sides. And now the idea is that what's going to happen when I put the cake in the first layer of sponge is that it's going to kind of push the cream up the sides anyway. So now my first layer of sponge is going to go in and I'm going to press it down. Peaches if you cooked the filling a little bit and you sliced them really thin. Yeah, I think it would work with plums would be really pretty. So now I'm going to just finish building my second layer of strawberries up at the top. And this is going to be taller than the swap I made yesterday because I have more filling. I have more strawberries than I did with the version I made last night. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take some of these
juices from the berries that have been mering and drizzle them over the sponge. More cream. You just want a thin layer again. And with this layer, I want to really make sure that I'm getting it down in between the layer and the sides of the pan. So now my merated berries are going to go in the center. And I'm going to avoid adding the juices cuz I can put those I'm going to use those to soak my second cake layer. And these don't need to be arranged nicely at all. They can just kind of as long as they're in an even layer, that's all you really need. You can kind of pat them down. Any remaining slices of strawberry. I actually need to like make a another perimeter at the very top. I have a lot of these little pieces like the end
slices which are coming in handy because I have just sort of smaller gaps to fill at this point. Now, a little bit of pastry cream to work up the sides again just like I did in that bottom layer. Now, with this cake layer, I'm going to add the remaining juices. Not at all even apparently. And this is going to go soaked side down into my pan. And I'm going to press. That pressure is going to help force the filling into any gaps. Okay. And now the last thing is just a super thin layer of filling over the layer of cake. And it's just going to help like seal everything really well and keep the cake like really hydrated.
I'm going to press that down into the sides as well to fill any little remaining gaps. I'm right up at the top of this pan, which is so cool. It's going to be enormous. Two lbs of strawberries in this cake. The assembly is done. I just need one final layer of plastic over top. Now, this has to go in the fridge because the gelatin really needs to set. The only way that this is going to become remotely slicable is if it chills for like at least 12 hours. I have one in the fridge that I made last night. So, I have my swap that I made last night. It's been chilling for, you know, you want it at least 12 hours so that everything sets. I'm really, really excited to see how it looks.
Okay. So, I'm going to pull the plastic down, but I don't even need to tug on the plastic to help me because it's a removable bottom. So, it just kind of slides right out. Oh my gosh, it turned out so pretty. I love it. This was my vision. All right. And now I'm so excited to taste it. I'm ready to take a slice. The slicing is a little bit tricky. You want to use a sharp serrated knife and just kind of gently saw your way through the berries. So, this version is going to have slightly different proportions than the version I just made because somebody last night ate a few of my strawberries from my measured out quantity.
So, this one is just a little bit shorter than the one I just made. So, my version will have more berries in the middle. Okay. I'm so excited to taste it. So, here you can see the cut side. I love the proportion of everything. It's like enough of the creamy filling to bind everything. And then the cake is super light. And I love the sponge cake because you can serve it cold. Like it doesn't get hard. Like a buttercake is so soft and light. 2 lbs of fresh strawberries in a dessert is really a lot. So I just love that it packs them in. so much.
It's like strawberry shortcake, strawberries and cream, sponge cake. Such a good canvas for the ripe fruit and also like a little bit of the flavor enhancing from like the gramier. A little bit of sugar. It's not super sweet at all. The vanilla all goes so well together. I really love it. Yeah, I know summer is the time where people are like, "No one wants to be in the kitchen." But it's like the best time of year for fruit. And so it's like I actually end up baking a lot in the summer like pies and galletes. And so here the fruit's not cooked, but you have the sponge cake. You have this um diplomat cream. It's such an amazing combination and like such a showstopping celebration cake. So I really think you
should give it a try. Sometimes it's just fun to get in the kitchen and have a little bit of a project. So this one's a winner. I just love the way it turned out. And also it's like at least you don't have to decorate it then. This is the decoration's built right in. So hope you give it a try. Go and find some great farmers market strawberries. Thank you so much for watching and don't forget to like and subscribe.
