Fresh Strawberry Cake

When you have fresh strawberries at your fingertips, you just have to find recipes to use them.  This strawberry cake would be good with a strawberry icing, but not while I'm in Oregon with as many strawberries as I want. That would be a sin, I'm sure of it. The recipe came from Country Living Magazine. Not sure which month, but I'm sure it was a Summer month of 2011.


Printable Recipe:
https://sites.google.com/site/whatscookingsherry/fresh-strawberry-cake

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup softened butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons sugar
1 cup strawberry preserves
4 eggs
3/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon red food coloring won't be needed if you have ripened on the vine strawberries
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 3/4 cups heavy cream
1 1/2 pints strawberries, hulled
Directions for cake:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line two 9" cake pans with parchment paper. Lightly coat the pan with butter, dust with flour, and tap out excess. Set aside. Sift the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda together and set aside. Cream the butter and 1 1/2 cups sugar until light and fluffy in a large bowl.Add 3/4 cups of strawberry preserves and the eggs, one at a time, blending each addition throughly. Scrap down the sides of bowl and beat in vanilla extract and the food coloring if needed. Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the flour mixture by thirds, alternating with the buttermilk and ending with a final addition of the dry mixture. Divide the batter equally between the pans and spread evenly. Bake on the middle rack of the oven until a tester inserted in the center of each cake layer comes out clean--about 20-30 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack. I didn't have cake pans in the little house and was too lazy to go borrow cake pans from Carolyn, so I just used small loaf pans (4X8). It made three cakes. So I served one, and saved the other 2 for later.
Directions for assembling the cake:
Beat the whipping cream and remaing 2 tablespoons of sugar to soft peaks and spread over the top of one layer. Wrap and freeze the remaining layer for up to 2 months. Top with strawberries and drizzle with remaining preserves. Serve immediately. As you can see by my picture, I cut the cake into serving pieces, topped with strawberries and strawberry jam that I heated in the microwave to make it thinner. Then topped the whole thing with a dollop of whipped cream.