BWJ - French strawberry cake

I am back in Oz after spending 2 1/2 weeks on the West Coast of the United States. If you thought that I was unusually quiet, this is the explanation. I had a marvellous time on my vacation, and I will share parts of it with you in due course.  It was bright and sunny and warm on the West Coast, and I have returned to miserable, cold weather, and have already contracted a cold. I would love to go back to that beautiful weather, if only I could, but alas, it is a beautiful fantasy, and I have to resign myself to reality.    

This week for Baking with Julia, our recipe brought back images of childhood, when in summer, my mother would bake sponge cake and fill it with cream and strawberries.  Our recipe was French strawberry cake, based on a French sponge, the genoise, and filled with two layers of strawberries and cream, and smothered in more cream.  My kitchen smelt devine after I baked this!

Step by step, you start with a plain genoise:

You then split the genoise into three layers and fill them with mashed strawberries:

and lashings of freshly whipped cream:

and end up with something like this:

then smother it all in whipped cream:

And when you are ready, you cut yourself a generous slice, and admire the layers: 

To see what the other BWJ members thought of this cake, visit the LYL section of the BWJ website.