This Christmas I decided to make a fraisier cake. Generally it is a traditional French birthday cake, and is a bit more summery in style than many Christmas cakes. Yet, modern life allows us to find strawberries during pretty much any season of the year, so I was able to put this cake together despite the winter chill.
I’m pretty happy with how it came out, visually speaking, and the taste of it was a real delight. After all, the cake did hold shape, even with all of those halved berries placed precariously out along the exterior walls of the cake.
The “sponge” of the cake is a genoise, with its only raising agent being the eggs, beaten into a soft yellow, fluffy mass.
I found the directions for how to assemble the cake, as well as the recipe for the lemon sugar syrup (which is used to saturate the sponge and adds flavor and moisture) on the BBC Food website.
At first I felt daunted by the idea of making my own marzipan to top the cake, but it turned out being surprisingly easy to do!
The combination of lemon syrup-soaked genoise, together with pastry cream (I added some extra butter to the cream after it was cooked, to mimic mousseline cream) and fresh strawberries is a dream.
And… apparently it is a dream you can enjoy all year round, even at Christmas!
Thank you for posting! This is one of my favorite types of cake. I followed the recipe exactly, but instead of making one big cake I made mini tea cakes, decorated with raspberries on top. They looked and tasted wonderful.
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Sarah, I am so glad you enjoyed this recipe! It is definitely a favorite in my book, too, and I’ll be making it again in the future.
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