old-fashioned berry layer cake

We celebrated Father’s Day for my dad this past Sunday. It was beautiful outside sitting by the pool and having a barbeque. We brought a potato salad and this Old-Fashioned Berry Layer Cake from the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook. What a gorgeous masterpiece this cake turned out to be.

The cake was a very easy & fun bake with no unusual ingredients - most of which anyone would have on-hand. My new Kitchen-Aid stand mixer made light work of this cake as 10 eggs need to be beaten for 5 minutes at high speed. I was really pleased with how the cake baked-up. The two cakes get halved and filled with whipped cream and berries. Our initial plan was to take Owen strawberry picking, but most of the patches are closed on Sundays, so we did the next best thing and picked up berries from the farm stand. I chose a quart of small berries for this cake so they could stay intact and not have to be sliced. 

This is a very large cake that serves at least 10 people. But beware, as soon as you slice through half the cake it takes great amount of skill and care to slice the second half without the layers toppling. I guess round berries and light whip cream don’t make for the best mortar between cake layers. Ah, it tastes great either way.