Stacked Layered Recording in Cubase 5

This may be a dumb question but it’s the one thing I can’t figure out.
If I know I want to set up several layers within a track because there’s going to be mistakes and retakes and so on, Is there a quick way to do this within Cubase without looping and stacking? If I just want to start at a point and start playing over the the mistake area that will be cut out. And if so, how? And can I make both layers audible if I choose too? Seems like one layer is only audible at a time and the other one always gets muted. I could do this easy when I had Sonar but it seems a little more tricky in Cubase.