Strawberry Shortcake Cake part 2

So, hard part is over, now you just have to put the cake together.

First, make sure your strawberries are delicious. When you get them from the store, give them a good sniff. We'd all like to be able to taste before we buy with berries because lots of times looking good does not equal tasting good. But, you know, I'd like a pony too. Tasty smelling strawberries are a good pointer towards tasty tasting strawberries. And give them a good look too, no one likes to get home a pack of berries to find a bunch of rotten or moldy ones hanging out just under the sticker. One quart sized pack should be good for this cake. Take the bigger or nicer looking ones out for decoration. Ugly strawberries belong inside cakes where we can appreciate thier deliciousness.

I cut up about half the berries in the pack, taking off the green bits and stuck them in a bowl. Because it's late season and I don't trust them, I sprinkled them with a bit of sugar. Taste your berries, you might not need it, but mine did.

Told you I'd do closeups next time...

It shouldn't look like it just snowed on them, but you should have a decent amount of sugar on them. Sugar loooooves water, so when you sprinkle it on fresh cut fruit it sucks all the juices out and makes a sauce. It's called macerating, but we don't need to be fancy here.

Now for the cream. My family uses the recipe off the side of the powdered sugar box which is three heaping teaspoons of powdered sugar for each pint of cream you're using. I used a pint and a half and had some extra. I leave vanilla to your discretion. I like it with this cake, but if you don't feel the need, I won't argue. And use heavy cream, not light cream. It's actually important to the cake because you're not going to whip it as far as you would for ice cream topping and you don't want it to drip all over the place or turn into butter. Light cream isn't good icing cream.

Whip it about this far

Hmmm. Can you see that? It's still creamy and together, no huge lumps starting to form. You want the mixer to leave tracks in the cream. We do this because while we want the cream to stay on and in the cake, we do not want it to turn into butter while we're icing it. The more you play with whipped cream, the closer to butter it gets. Plus, it looks smoother this way when it's on the cake.

You've got your lovely cake, you've got your lovely strawberries in their lovely strawberry juices, and you have your smooth whipped cream, so we're good to go. Now you've got your first layer down. If you drain your strawberries you can pour the juices fairly evenly over top the layer so you don't lose any goodness. I didn't because I forgot, which you can see in the next picture here.

Which is sideways. Huh. Well, that's why I'm doing this while no one's reading the blog yet. I'll edit it at a later date to be right side up. Ok, anyway, the point is that I put a layer of cream on the cake and then the strawberries on top of that. Wet strawberries are slippery and I'm not kidding when I say if you don't use the whipped cream as glue they'll slide riiiiiiiight off. And take the top layer down with it. They're selfish like that. So, cream-strawberries-cream then the top of the cake. Center it and then you can ice it with the whipped cream.

Because you were awesome and made a soft whipped cream like I told you (you did, didn't you?), you now have a little leeway when you're icing. A good straight sided metal spatula will be your best friend in this, but if you don't have one, you can always use the back of a butter knife. They're usually pretty straight and you can get nice sides like that. One good guideline is that you should always put on more icing than you need because it's a lot easier to take it off than it is to put extra on.

Mine came out like this:

Top view only because I forgot to take a side view picture. I didn't have to do much decorating because the strawberries did all the work for me. Make sure you have extra around because the way these things get cut not everyone is going to get a whole strawberry and you want to avoid tears. We shall not speak of my writing skills, suffice to say, I haven't been practising. 

Whipped Cream-

1 pint heavy cream

3 heaping teaspoons powdered sugar

1 tsp. vanilla