Easy Strawberry Cake

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Finding a really good yet easy strawberry cake recipe is not as simple as you might believe. Strawberry is a fan favorite for summer, but infusing that tangy, sweet berry flavor into a cake proved a bit challenging.

I love a good cake mix hack, so when I started researching and trying out strawberry cake recipes, I started there. To be honest, it wasn’t good. In fact, it was pretty awful. I tried the strawberry box cake mix as well as taking a really good vanilla cake mix and adding in strawberries. They were both absolutely terrible.

So I’m going to give you my honest opinion on this. If you want a good strawberry cake, you need to make it from scratch. You also want to cook the strawberries down to a jam like substance, only with less moisture.

Time for some tough love. While today’s cake is billed an easy strawberry cake, getting strawberry flavor into the cake part of this is pretty tough.

• Adding cut fruit to cake batter is a sure fired method for disappointment. You’ll wind up with soggy cake full of globs of unflavorful chunks that used to be strawberries.
• If you think running the raw fruit through the food processor first and then pouring that mess into the cake batter is going to be any better, let me stop you right there. You’ll wind up with a cake that won’t bake. Remember that in baking the ratios of wet to dry ingredients is critical, so dumping a pureed mess into a batter only adds water which is going to totally throw off the wet to dry proportions.

Ok, ok, ok….so if the raw fruit isn’t going to work, what do we do? We cook the fruit, of course!

Mixing the Strawberry Cake Batter

This cake is essentially a vanilla cake with the strawberry paste we made in the last step. It imparts a lovely flavor and it colors the batter a pretty pink. You don’t even need to use food coloring to get that pretty shade.

A couple of words on ingredients:

• As a fan of the Great British Bake Off, I switched to using what they call Castor sugar in just about all of my baking. In American terms, it’s the same thing as Super Fine sugar. It’s a finer grain than standard granulated sugar. It essentially dissolves easily into the wet ingredients and creates a smoother, better mixed batter. The only issue I’ve had using it is that it tends to clump over time as it sits in the storage container. So I sift all my castor sugar before mixing it into the batter or dough. Then it’s totally smooth. I bake using weight, in this case grams, so measurements are unaffected by whether I sift before or after measurement. If you use volume, or cups, then sift first and measure from the smooth sugar.
• Use the best quality of eggs you can get your hands on. Baking is special and so your ingredients should be the best you can afford. Always take your eggs out ahead of time so they are room temperature when you use them.

Let’s show some love for small cakes.

I have a small family and find that dessert recipes are generally written for a platoon of people. Or a family with a couple of teenagers. I don’t have either, so I often size my cake recipes down. I developed today’s strawberry cake for 2 6″ cakes.

I love 6″ cakes! The pans are from Wilton and easy to find in a craft store on the cake aisle or on amazon. Today’s recipe uses two 6″ pans. If I bake a full sized cake recipe, then 3 6″ pans work wonderfully. A 3 layer cake looks impressive, and is perfect for a special party or celebration.

Fun Fact: icing is actually the stuff you put on sweet rolls and frosting is what we put on cakes. But the terms are often used interchangeably.

The icing on the cake

A strawberry cake would not be complete without a rich Strawberry Frosting.

• Make this strawberry frosting similar to my raspberry buttercream frosting using a nearly identical secret ingredient: freeze dried strawberries. They are a power house of flavor, and adding them to the powdered sugar as another dry ingredient in the frosting gives both a beautiful color and fantastic flavor. I pick up mine in Trader Joe’s but if you don’t have one nearby I can share a link to them for you.
• The frosting is a mix of cream cheese and butter. The cream cheese provides a tang that cuts the sweetness of the powdered sugar and complements the strawberries.
• Preparing the freeze dried strawberries is a two step process. First, pulverize them in the food processor into a dust. The sift the dust to separate the strawberries from the seeds. This yields a smoother frosting. Save those chunky bits left in the sieve to sprinkle on top of the cake as a pretty garnish.

Tips for decorating the cake:

• The pink frosting is perfectly lovely on its own, but a pretty garnish makes an enchanting and finished presentation. It’s always a good practice to use something in the recipe itself as the garnish, and in this case a sliced strawberry with the sprinkled chunky leftovers from the pulverized dried fruit looks appealing. Instead of sprinkles, the pink powdered strawberries look amazing, so don’t throw out the leftovers.
• Fresh flowers and cake go together. But you must careful about using flowers. Commerical flowers are treated with fungicides and herbicides, and must not come into contact with food. I shudder seeing people using grocery store roses, the most toxic cut flower available. Sad but true. So you either need a barrier between the flowers and the cake, or you need organic flowers. I grow several varieties of herbs and flowers in my garden, so these sweet petunias were perfect as a final decoration.
• Incorporate a rustic touch to your frosting technique. The precision and smoothness of cakes I see on instagram blow me away. The workmanship is incredible, and completely impractical. Enjoy baking your cakes and relish in simpler decorations. Focus on flavor and texture instead of perfection. People will love your pretty cake topped with flowers and herbs fresh from you own garden.

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