Marionberry Shortcake

This weekend the very welcomed baking project with the Heavenly Cake Bakers was a Marionberry Shortcake. Fresh fruit on light cake topped with sweetened whipped cream, what's not to like about that! The first challenge in my prep stage turned out to be locating Marionberries. I can tell you with certainity that there isn't a grocer within 40 miles of my home that carries marionberries. No worries though.... I picked up some beautiful raspberries instead.

This recipe easily seperated into three components; cake, filling, and topping. The first component is the shortcake. I must say I expected this to be dry with the small amount of butter and "Wondra" flour. I am happy to say this was not the case. So onward...

The ingredients for this version of genoise is the ever tasty beurre noisette (browned butter for any of you new comers), eggs, sugar, vanilla and Wondra flour. Since I do not use this flour I followed Rose's suggestion and substituted a mixture of cake flour and corn starch. The directions were easy to follow and yielded a nice amount of light and fluffy batter. Here I used a large muffin pan to bake off the 6 individual sized cakes taking only about 20 minutes in the oven. After the cakes cooled completely I trimmed the bottom and top (that stickly layer that forms after cooling). Then proceeded to cut a 1/4" deep cavity for the fruit to rest.

Ah, now the fruit! I really would have liked to find Marionberries since I have never tasted them. But, as mentioned above, no such luck. Anyway, I took the raspberries and added some sugar, covered and let them rest in the refrigerator. This didn't yield as much juice as I would have liked. But once again Rose rescued me with her suggestion to add some Chambord to the muxture. Now this was a nice addition I didn't mind at all!

The last step was to whip up some sweetened whipped cream for the topping (I gave it a little pink tint to match the berry syrup). Now on to assemble then taste of course! Taking one cake at a time the top and bottom was gently brushed with some of the syrup. Next spoon some berries into the pre-cut cavity and top off with whipped cream.

I was very pleased with the results of this project. The cake was light and very tasty (thanks to the browned butter), and the timing for the raspberries was perfect. Overall the finished dessert was very pleasing and satisfying- a success.