It's strawberry time in North America. I look forward to this season all year long. You can get strawberries most any time of year but in the off-season they are tasteless and bland. As Spring well...springs, the real fresh ones start arriving. Fresh in-season strawberries are a deeper red, they smell like strawberries are supposed to smell, they taste delicious, and they become much less expensive (we get them on sale sometimes for $1/pound).
What's even better is that strawberries are good for you--an exciting exception to that age-old childhood lament "why is it that all the food that tastes good is bad for you?". Strawberries are low in calories, very high in antioxidants, full of anti-inflammatories, and rich in vitamins (e.g. 1 cup give you over 140% of your daily requirement of vitamin C). Given all those nutritional advantages here are some of the key health benefits of strawberries:
- Cardiovascular support and prevention of cardiovascular diseases
- Improved regulation of blood sugar, with decreased risk of type 2 diabetes
- Prevention of certain cancer types including breast, cervical, colon, and esophageal cancer
We love strawberry shortcake, but due to the high proportion of shortening in the shortcake and all the fat in the cream I decided to go a different route and make a Spiral Sponge Strawberry Cream Cake. This is simply a sponge cake made with coconut oil (i.e. no cholesterol) rather than shortening rolled up with sliced strawberries and a cream filling made with kefir cheese. The result was mmm-good!
Here's how to make Spiral Sponge Strawberry Cream Cake:
Strawberry and Cream Filling
- 3 cups Strawberries - sliced
- 3/4 cup Sugar
Slice the strawberries, mix in the sugar and set aside.
- 2 cups Kefir Cheese or Yogurt Cheese (make these yourself by straining low-fat kefir or yogurt with a coffee filter until you get a cream cheese-like consistency)
- 3/4 cup Sugar
- 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
Whip together all the ingredients with a hand blender or whisk until smooth.
Sponge Cake
- 1 cup Sugar - ground in a blender to a fine powder which absorbs more easily into the eggs
- 1 tsp Salt
- 8 Eggs - large
- 1 3/4 cups Flour - sifted
- 1/2 cup Coconut Oil - melted
- 2/3 cup milk
Sift flour, set aside. Grease and line a large cookie sheet, dust with flour, and set aside. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit. Position the rack in the lower part of the oven. With an electric mixer (I use the whisk attachment on my Blendtec Mix 'n Blend), whisk eggs, sugar, and salt on high speed for 6 minutes, until the batter doubles in volume. Turn to LOW speed and whisk for another 2 mins. Whisking at low speed helps to stabilise the air bubbles in the batter which is important because in this recipe there is no baking powder--the eggs are the leavening.
Add the sifted flour into the batter and fold it gently with a spatula until well blended. With a spatula, mix a third of the batter with the melted coconut oil in a separate bowl and then fold this mixture back into the remaining batter (this way the oil won't deflate the batter). Add in the milk and fold in gently with spatula.
Pour the batter into the pan and bake for 35 mins, carefully slide it off the pan onto the counter. Spread with the cream filling, cover with strawberries, and roll the cake along the long edge. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to serve, then slice and serve with additional sliced and sweetened strawberries on top.
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