TWD- Berry Surprise Cake

Mary Ann of  Meet Me in the Kitchen chose Berry Surprise Cake on pages 273-275 of Baking from My Home From Yours by Dorie Greenspan.

This desert is made up of a genoise sponge cake filled with cream cheese lightened with whipped cream and berries.  Dorie also suggested covering the confection with sweetened whipped cream but I took just one step back from that and topped out with ‘just’ the filling.

I decided to make 4x 4inch cakes.  Sadly my genoise fell.  I have made a few (with RLB recipe) and this is the first time it has happened to me.  I even used some of my precious bleached flour in this and weighed everything.   My eggs and sugar needed closer to 7 minutes to get properly ribbony

The only brightside is out of the 4 cakes 2 fell down to 1/3 of the time and the other 2 were at 2/3’s they also had slightly raised edges which meant I could in fact just sandwich them together with no tricksy carving.  I had a bit of batter left over and I made cupcakes in silicone cups.  The interesting thing is they didn’t fall. So I guess it wasn’t the leavening or temperature.  I can see that others had problems with the cake falling and Dorie suggests a bit of centre sinkage is normal.

I will consider problem solving another day.

This was a nice tasting cake.   I still have the grumbles about the genoise falling so it does impact on my general love in for this project.  I used frozen mixed berries and some cherry liquer to moisten the cake.  Genoise really does sparkle with syrup and doesn’t live up to it’s potential without it.

I may try some whipped cream on top for tomorrows cake (the advantage of making some smaller cakes he, he!)

Now go and check out the TWD blogroll for the other berry surprises!