Which, of course, comes from the French word for strawberries. This month’s dessert is made with fresh strawberries, pastry cream, lemon chiffon cake, and marzipan. How could one go wrong?! Jana of Cherry Tea Cakes was our July Daring Bakers’ host and she challenges us to make Fresh Frasiers inspired by recipes written by Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson in the beautiful cookbook Tartine. While it was delicious, I think I made an already involved dessert unnecessarily difficult by making it in many little petit fours sized cakes instead of one big round one. Definitely worth doing if you have lots of time and someone to impress, but for my next attempt, I’ll be making one big round cake. In case anyone wants to try the little ones, here’s what we did and a pdf version of the recipe.
We cut up cardboard boxes (mac and cheese type boxes) and molded it into shape by wrapping and folding it around the star shaped cookie cutter that we later used to cut out pieces of cake and marzipan. The forms were lined on the inside with plastic wrap to keep the dessert from sticking.
First: one layer of cake.
Insert into molds and soak with lemon syrup.
Then the fruit; pretty ones against the sides and chopped up fruit filling the center. Next, the remaining space was filled with the pastry cream.
One more layer of syrup soaked cake. (We did some circles as well as stars because I ran out of patience with making star molds!)
Then a layer of marzipan, et voila! Well, almost. Then the desserts have to sit in the fridge for a while and become firm enough to stand alone when the forms are removed.
Love stars! Looks great. You must have so much patience though to make all those molds!