The fourteenth recipe that I made from Bake! by Nick Malgieri was Strawberry Chantilly Cake, found on page 163.
This was my pick for the group this week. I knew that my pick was going to fall in my birthday week, so I searched the book looking for a recipe with strawberries and whipped cream and cake...those are my favorite ingredients for my birthday cake each year. Most of the time my first choice in birthday cakes is day old angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries to top it off. Yum! This recipe seemed very close to that and I was looking forward to trying the cake that the recipe recommended.
You make the cake layers (in my case I made a six inch cake, half of the recipe in the book makes two six inch layers), let them cool, and frost the cake with whipped cream (I used 2/3 of the frosting recipe just to be safe and it took every bit of that). There are strawberries and whipped cream between the layers and a few strawberries to decorate the outside, so you need about a pint of fresh strawberries.
All of it fairly simple and not too fussy. I'm not that great at cake decorating, but this was fairly easy and who is going to find fault when they get to eat strawberries and whipped cream?
Ingredient list for the Moist Yellow Cake Layers (page 124): flour, baking powder, salt, eggs, milk, butter, sugar, and vanilla. The ingredient list for the Sweetened Whipped Cream (page 159): heavy whipping cream, sugar, and vanilla.
I made the cake the day of my birthday and we cut it and ate it in the evening. I didn't care for it. Seriously, the cake was a bit stiff and had too much "yellow" flavor (don't ask me what that means because I am not really sure other than I wished that I had made a white cake instead). I took a couple of bites and Matt happily finished my piece as the guys just loved it.
I tried it again the next day. So good on the second day...I think the berries/juice and whipped cream sort of settled in and called the cake home with that extra time because I really liked it all the second day...it was absolutely delicious. I recommend making it one day and letting it sit in the refrigerator overnight and serving it the next day...really, there was such a difference in taste, it was just wonderful! Definitely a repeat.
