To appreciate this cake, you need two things: taste buds - hopefully a non-hurdle when cream, meringue, butter cake, and fresh berries are involved - and to embrace the dishevelment of it. a square one of the same volume, it always seems easier to get as many servings as needed when you can cut straight across a narrow cake. Even though I do understand that mathematically, one does not get more slices from a long cake vs. Long, rectangular desserts fit easily in the bottom of shopping bags, a primary consideration of mine when making a cake to bring places. I realize that there are more practical ways to approach it, such as a single-layer cake, but I didn’t want practical, I wanted berry cake chaos.Īnd so I made a two-layer brita cake from a 9×13 in, perhaps, the least rational way possible: I divided it the long way.

In image search after image search, I drooled over charmingly lopsided cakes with raw edges, whipped cream with no regard for boundaries, meringues that wobbled and crumbled as they pleased, berries tumbling free, and I wanted it. I first read about brita, pardon me, Brita-Kakku, cakes - described as a typical Finnish summer cake with a based of a butter cake with a meringue baked onto it, whipped cream, and fresh berries - a few years ago and was instantly mesmerized by not just by the delicious promise of these ingredients but because, forgive me, the mess of it.

Smitten Image by Pam B. Morris