A strawberry swirl shortcake
Original recipes from Live Well, Bake Often and Gourmet Traveller
With another birthday cake comes endless hours spent dreaming up the perfect bespoke treat. Often times I find myself conjuring up ideas for the next birthday cake as soon as the previous one has passed, even when there are weeks, if not months, between them.
This was the case here. For no good reason, when the idea of a pink and white marbled shortcake layered with vanilla bean mascarpone frosting popped into my head one Sunday afternoon it just clicked. Classic, polished and a little bit fancy, this cake seemed to fit the person it was intended for.
To achieve the pink and white swirl I’d imagined, I needed to find a white cake that wouldn’t yellow in too much in the baking process. After many a night spent searching, I eventually decided on Live Well, Bake Often’s the best white cake recipe.
To my delight, despite what I’d read online from fellow Australians, I managed to find cake flour in the baking aisle of my local supermarket and stick to this recipe as closely as possible.
Adhering to the ‘classic, polished and a little bit fancy’ theme I’d assigned to this cake, I wanted to really champion the vanilla in the mascarpone frosting. To do so, I sourced a recipe that used scraped vanilla beans rather than an essence or extract.
This led me to Gourmet Traveller’s spiced banana and walnut slice with mascarpone frosting. Revelling in its simplicity and reliance on quality ingredients in lieu of culinary tricks, I was immediately convinced. As this was a tri-layered cake, I doubled the original recipe to ensure a generous cake-to-frosting ratio.
Ingredients
Vanilla shortcake:
305 g cake flour
1 tbsp baking powder
¾ tsp salt
240 ml buttermilk, room temperature
2 tsp vanilla extract
230 g unsalted butter, softened
350 g white sugar
5 egg whites, room temperature
pink gel food colouring*
Mascarpone frosting:
700 g mascarpone
100 g brown sugar
scraped seeds of 2 vanilla beans
Toppings:
- 400 g strawberries, hulled**
Method
Preheat the oven to 180C.
Spray three 9-inch cake pans with cooking spray, line the bottoms with baking paper and set aside.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk the cake flour, baking powder and salt to combine, then set aside.
Combine the buttermilk and vanilla extract in a measuring jug and stir until well combined, then set aside.
In the bowl of an electric stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream together the softened butter and sugar for 4-5 minutes or until light and fluffy.
On low speed, add the dry ingredients to the creamed butter and sugar in three additions, alternating with the buttermilk mixture each time but beginning and ending with the dry ingredients.
In a clean bowl of the electric stand mixer, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Gently fold half of the egg whites into the batter, then fold the remaining egg whites until just combined.
Separate the cake batter into two bowls and set one aside.
Slowly add pink gel food colouring two drops at a time, gently folding after each addition until the desired shade is achieved. ***
Alternate dollops of white and pink cake batter into one of the prepared tins until approximately a third of the batter is used.
Repeat in the remaining two pans.
Bake cakes on the middle rack of 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.
Remove from oven and allow to cool in the pan for 20 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
For the frosting, beat mascarpone, brown sugar and vanilla bean seeds in the bowl of an electric standing mixer until soft peaks form.
To assemble, dollop a spoonful of mascarpone frosting onto a cake board and set one of the cake layers on top. Spread with frosting and top with another cake layer, repeat with remaining cake layer and top with remaining frosting.
Starting from the outside perimeter of the top layer, place a ring of strawberries, hulled side down. Working inwards, continue placing rings of strawberries until you reach the centre.
Dust with icing sugar and serve.
Notes
* Using gel food colouring will help hold the colour during baking.
** When you’re selecting strawberries, try to find a punnet with uniform berries on the smaller size. This will aid in consistency when it comes to decorating.
*** You’ll want to be extra careful not to overmix the whites when folding in the pink food colouring – go gently and don’t worry if it isn’t perfectly mixed through. Overdoing it will cause the cake to lose that beautiful airiness from the whipped egg whites.