TWD: Baking with Julia - French Strawberry Cake

Well, I am finally around town this Tuesday so I had to whip up what was scheduled, especially when I heard it was strawberry cake.  It started out with a French cake called a genoise and then was sliced into layers and filled with cream frosting and strawberries.  I thought about trying to only make half the recipe, but then when I read through the whole recipe it only made one 8 inch round square cake so I decided just to give it a go and be short on the strawberries.  I couldn't find my 8 inch round cake pan so I decided the square one would suffice. And then I bought a pint of strawberries on Sunday and today they were about half gone... whoops!

Well the genoise was something new for me, it was eggs and sugar whipped with a little vanilla extract and then cake flour and sugar stirred in and then butter folded into the batter at the end.  I was a little scared to over mix it, but I am not sure I mixed it enough.  It didn't seem to rise very much so it could have been my mixing, but I am going to blame it on baking at a high altitude and in an 85 degree house!  Here are my pictures of getting the cake ready.

Once the cake was cooled, I whipped up the heavy whipping cream with some sour cream, sugar and vanilla.  The recipe said to cut the cake into three sections, but since the altitude didn't let my cake rise at all I stuck to just two layers.  Covered the first layer with strawberries and whipped cream and then covered the top layer with more whipped cream.

I thought for sure it would be my new favorite cake, but my dad's favorite chocolate chocolate was pretty good on Father's Day and I think I might have like it better even with all the frosting!  This cake kind of tasted like eggs and the texture of the cake was kind of eggy too, it didn't seem like cake.  I might try it again some day after I try to make genoise for some of the other recipes in the Baking with Julia cookbook.  If you would like to check out the recipe the two hosts were Sophia and Allison!