July Daring Bakers' Challenge - Fraisier

Man, it has been hot recently! Seriously, record breaking heat in these parts. What could be better, in the midst of a heat wave, than a Daring Bakers' Challenge?

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.

The fraisier has three main components - the cake, the filling and the fruit. As the name of the dessert is derived from the French word for strawberry, that is the most traditional fruit to use. The final dessert consists of two layers of cake, each of which is brushed with simple syrup, and between which is a layer of cream and a decorative arrangement of strawberries.

Aside from the actual baking and construction of this dessert, it was evident after reading through the recipe and directions that time management would be a very important factor in creating the fraisier. To help myself, I gave myself two days to complete this challenge.

Day one involved making the chiffon cake and the pastry cream.

Chiffon cakes, as I tend to describe them, are kind of a cross between a regular (batter) cake and an angel food (foamy, made from whipped egg whites) cake. It is a very light, very lovely kind of cake. Making the chiffon cake is straightforward, but requires precision, lots of bowls, and the ability to separate eggs. I thought I had all three. But apparently my egg separating skills decided to take a vacation that day. Seriously frustrating. It took, I kid you not, nine eggs (and a not insignificant amount of angry muttering) in order to yield the three egg yolks and five egg whites required by this recipe. On the bright side, we had delicious omelets for breakfast the next day.

Anyway, once the eggs were separated, little miss helped me to first mix the dry ingredients, then the wet. The only modification that I made to the recipe was to make it a vanilla chiffon cake, replacing the lemon zest called for in the recipe with the seeds of a vanilla bean.

Then we combined the wet and dry ingredients to create our base batter.

Batter mixed, it was time to carefully incorporate the stiffly-beaten egg whites.

The resulting batter was beautifully light and airy. Quickly and carefully, the batter was poured into a springform pan.

About 50 minutes in the oven and voila!

And, to my relief, the cake didn't even deflate after being removed from the oven, which sometimes happens to these delicate and temperamental cakes. Yay!

We set the cake aside to cool and got to work on our pastry cream. Following the modification that I'd made to the chiffon cake recipe, I added the pod from the vanilla bean in to my pot of milk as it heated, to infuse the milk, and thus the pastry cream, with extra vanilla flavor.

The scalded milk was then added to my mixer, in which eggs and sugar were actively being whisked. The mixture was then to be returned to the saucepan in order to cook and thicken. I am not sure if I was whisking on too high a speed or what, but when the hot milk was carefully added into the eggs and sugar, the resulting mixture became very, very foamy.

At this point, I was a little nervous as to whether my pastry cream would even out and become, well, cream, but within a few minutes, everything looked much more as I'd hoped they would.

Once the pastry cream was removed from the heat, the final step was to whisk in some butter, which, from what I have read, is traditional for pastry creams prepared especially for fraisiers.

Cake cooling, pastry cream covered with plastic wrap and placed into the fridge, day one of the fraisier challenge was finally complete.

The next morning, I awoke refreshed and ready to go on day two of this challenge.

To begin with, I made the simple syrup that would be brushed onto the layers of chiffon cake during the construction of the dessert. Like the cake and the pastry cream, I decided to up the vanilla flavor by adding a split vanilla bean to the sugar and water in the pot.

While the syrup cooled, I prepared the rest of my components for the construction phase.

The pastry cream was stabilized with softened gelatin, and then combined with freshly whipped cream to create a very light cream.

Next, the chiffon cake needed to be sliced in half to create two even layers. On my sister's suggestion, I used toothpicks to serve as a guide from my knife, then carefully cut around the cake.

I then prepared the strawberries themselves, washing, stemming, hulling and slicing them.

And then it was time to build.

The bottom cake layer was brushed with simple syrup:

And then a ring of strawberries was carefully arranged around the perimeter of the cake.

Using a piping bag (okay, a ziploc bag with the corner cut off), a layer of cream was piped around the strawberries:

And then more cream was piped onto the cake to cover the bottom layer.

On top of the cream, I sprinkled a layer of smaller cut strawberries.

And then came another layer of cream, which I smoothed over the whole thing to create a flat surface.

The second chiffon cake layer was carefully placed onto that flat cream surface, then brushed with more of the vanilla simple syrup.

The recipe called for the cake to then be covered with a disc of almond paste. I am not a big fan of almond paste, so I opted instead to use more of the whipped cream-pastry cream to cover my cake, and to use more halved strawberries for decoration.

To fill the middle of the cake, I decided to create a flower type design out of chocolate. I melted down some chocolate chips in a double boiler, then started drawing out designs. Little miss, never one to miss out on an opportunity to play with food, decided to help me draw with the chocolate. She said she had a special message for us. Look what she wrote:

So proud of that kid.

The tray of chocolate designs went into the fridge to cool, and, by the time we were ready to bring the dessert over to my in-laws' for that evening's dinner, I was pretty proud of the final results.

As impressed as the family was upon seeing the dessert in the pan, the reaction to the cake being unmolded was wonderful.

And as for the taste? Wow. This is an absolutely wonderful dessert. Each component on its own was delicious, but all together, the whole was even better than the sum of its parts. Neither the cake nor the cream was overly sweet, which made it very pleasant to eat, and also allowed the fresh, wonderful flavor of the strawberries to shine. The chiffon cake was deliciously light and the dessert was a huge hit.

Jana, I can't thank you enough for this wonderful challenge. I don't know that I ever would have had the courage to try such an ambitious dessert without this challenge, and the result was a cake more impressive than I ever would have believed came from my own kitchen. Thank you so much!

To see the other amazingly beautiful cakes baked in the Daring Kitchen this month, check them out here.