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In France the arrival of strawberries means fraisier cake—a precise stack of tender almond sponge and luscious pastry cream, belted around the middle with a perfectly straight row of strawberry cross-sections. Behind the patisserie glass you’ll find versions with elegant piping, paper-thin sheets of green marzipan, intricate chocolate work, and fruit gelée, but the strawberries are always the star of the show. The berries are almost like pillars holding the cream and cake in place, and the dessert is only as good (or as beautiful) as the strawberries you use.
At its simplest, fraisier cake is essentially one big sandwich of the reddest, ripest strawberries you can find. “The sweet is all about the berries and cream—the skinny cake is just there to frame them,” writes Dorie Greenspan in her book Baking Chez Moi.
There may be a million easier ways to enjoy the combination of berries and cream (like Eton mess, strawberry shortcake, and trifle), but it’s hard to beat the presentation here or the way the velvety pastry cream fuses with the cake to create the perfect, silky foil to the sharp, sweet flavor of the berries. This is why I’ve made it a ritual to celebrate strawberry season with a homemade fraisier cake each year. Every summer I head to the farmers market in search of the ripest, juiciest berries I can find and set aside an afternoon to bake the sponge and whisk together a pastry cream.
I suspect the following piece of advice may elicit some frowns and eye rolls from pastry chefs, but if you don’t feel like whipping up a meringue for the chiffon cake, you could substitute the sponge (like a hot milk cake) of your choice or even use cake mix. (I won’t tell, I promise.)
Once you have your cake and pastry cream, all you have to do is slice your strawberries and build the cake with the help of a cake ring. You’ll use this ring to cut out two circles from your sheet cake, then use the very same ring to assemble the dessert: Lay a slice of cake down, then line your halved strawberries along the perimeter of the mold. Use some of the pastry cream to keep those halves in place, then fill the center of the cake with more whole strawberries and top it off with more pastry cream, followed by the second layer of cake.
After you garnish with yet more strawberries, you’ll set the dessert in the fridge right in the ring and allow time and refrigeration to work their magic overnight, which helps to firm up the pastry cream, making it easier to unmold. The grand reveal happens the next day, and the key to successfully unmolding the cake is doing it with speed and confidence while the dessert is still cold. It’s hard to match the excitement of seeing the unmolded fraisier cake in all its glory, but even better is that very first bite of juicy strawberries and rich pastry cream.
