Fraisier

The fraisier cake, it's a beautiful cake, sometimes I think they look better than they actually taste, call it personal preference. It's not actually very difficult to make as long as you follow the instructions perfectly. 

Ingredients (genoise sponge):

• 4 large eggs
• 125g self raising flour
• 125g caster sugar
• 50g unsalted butter

1. To make the sponge, pre-heat oven to 180 degrees C
2. Grease and line 9 inch baking tin with baking parchment
3. Weigh out the butter and warm it in the microwave until melted, set it aside and let it cool down for 20-30 minutes 
4. Sift and weigh flour and set aside, we'll come back to this
5. Heat water in s saucepan until it starts to simmer and keep it on a low heat
6. Put the eggs and sugar together in a large bowl and gently whisk to break eggs and incorporate the sugar
7. Put the bowl containing egg/sugar mixture over simmering water and beat with hand held electric whisk continuously at high speed until the mixture has at least tripled in volume and leaves a trail of ribbon. This can take about 10-15 minutes of continuous whisking, so, be patient (if you have a stand up whisk, put it on high speed and let it whisk away until again, you see a trail of ribbon)
8. Add in the butter to the egg mixture from the side of the mixing bowl and whisk for 1 minute at medium speed
9. Add a third of the flour into the egg mixture and fold it in
10. Add the rest of the flour and fold in the rest very gently 
11. As soon as everything has been mixed, immediately pour cake mix into baking tin. 
12. Bake for 35-38 minutes and start preparing the fillings 
13. The surface should turn golden brown and sides start to shrink away from baking parchment
14. Cool in tin for 5 minutes and then take it out and cool on a wired rack 
15. When cooled, slice the cake horizontally into 2 thin sponges 
16. Line the tin with baking parchment and put one sponge back in the tin

Ingredients (strawberry jam) 

• 40g caster sugar
• 200g strawberries
• 2 leaves of gelatine

1. Wash and chop strawberries into thin slices
2. Soak gelatine in cold water for 5 minutes
3. Heat strawberries with sugar until it simmers and the mixture begins to go watery
4. Cut up the gelatine into small pieces and add to the strawberries and mix well
5. Heat for further 3 minutes
6. Leave it to cool down

Ingredients (mousseline)

• 175g caster sugar
• 4 large eggs and 2 large egg yolks
• 120g cornflour
• 600ml milk
• 1 and a half tbsp vanilla extract
• 80g unsalted butter

1. Beat sugar and eggs together until it is a pale yellow colour 
2. Mix in cornflour into the eggs until it resembles a lose paste consistency
3. Heat milk until it simmers and pour a little bit at a time into eggs and continue whisking the whole time
4. Pour eggs/milk back in saucepan and put it on medium heat and whisk the whole time until it has thickened
5. Add the butter in small chunks and incorporate into the custard
6. Add the vanilla and fold it in 
7. Set aside to cool

Ingredients (chocolate ganache)

• 70ml double cream
• 40g plain chocolate
• 30g muscovado sugar (if not, any sugar)

1. Heat cream and sugar together until simmer, set aside to cool for 2-3 minutes
2. Pour hot cream onto chocolate and melt it, whisk with spoon until chocolate has completely melted

Assembling

1. Put one half of sponge at bottom of tin
2. Spread strawberry jam over the sponge
3. Cut strawberries in half and line them on the side of the sponge (inside of strawberries facing out)
4. Pipe half of mousseline over the bottom sponge and place a layer of strawberries on it
5. Pour cooled chocolate ganache over the strawberries
6. Place remaining mousseline over the strawberry/chocolate layer, pipe mousseline over the strawberries on the side too
7. Place 2nd sponge layer on, use your palm and push down gently to push the mousseline to cover the gaps between strawberries
8. Spread remaining jam on the 2nd sponge
9. Place a thin rolled up marzipan on top
10. Decorate with strawberries and chocolate

Helpful tips

• Weigh out all genoise ingredients before you put egg/sugar mixture over simmering water, as you cannot stop whisking to weigh the other ingredients halfway through. And if you do that at the end after the eggs have built up the volume, then it can de-flate before you got the flour weighed out
• Warm the butter first thing, you want it to be completely cool before adding it to the cake batter
• Useful to have marzipan at room temperature when rolling it, or it will be quite hard
• Some people add the cornflour directly into the milk, don't do that, it's much harder to get rid of the lumps in the flour in such a large volume of liquid, do the mixing with the egg
• Once eggs have been added to hot milk, you MUST stir continuously and rather vigorously! 
• Useful to have a ruler to hand to measure how big your cake is so you can cut out your marzipan accurately (I didn't, hence my marzipan was much bigger than my cake)