My Easy Strawberry Cake Bursts With Real Berry Flavor

I’m one of three sisters, and all of our birthdays are within a few weeks of each other. My poor mother would make each of us a birthday cake, lighting the candles and going through the whole birthday party rigamarole week after week. She’d ask each of us what kind of cake we wanted, and while we tried to mix things up to keep it interesting, all any of us really wanted was a strawberry cake.

My mother made countless vibrant pink strawberry layer cakes, and we gobbled them up. I called her up when I started the recipe development process, and she revealed that the strawberry cakes she made for us growing up contained strawberry Jell-O, giving the cake its bright hue. 

When one of my sisters requested a strawberry cake as her wedding cake, my mother went back to the drawing board, making a semi-homemade and superior version using puréed strawberries and strawberry cake mix.

I wanted to recapture the strawberry cake magic I remember from my childhood in a homemade recipe. It took a lot of testing, but I finally ended up with a cake I’m delighted with—moist, tender, with tons of real strawberry flavor. And it’s incredibly easy to make!

Capturing Strawberry Flavor In Cake Form

The trickiest part about incorporating strawberries into a cake is their relatively subtle flavor and high water content. You need a lot of fresh strawberries to get the true flavor across, and that makes for one stodgy cake. They also lose some of their flavor during baking.

For the cake, I took inspiration from a Southern classic: jam cake. While jam cake is spiced and usually uses blackberry jam, I aimed for a tender but moist layer cake with a delicate and authentic strawberry flavor. A lot of homemade strawberry cake recipes call for puréeing strawberries and cooking them down—this sounded an awful lot like jam without sugar to me! So I decreased the amount of sugar you’d typically put in a cake like this and swapped it out for strawberry jam. (I use store-bought but you could make your own strawberry jam.)

The powerful fresh strawberry flavor really comes from the frosting, inspired by the strawberry cake frosting on Sally’s Baking Addiction. It’s a quick and easy cream cheese frosting with one key ingredient: ground freeze-dried strawberries. They add tons of real strawberry flavor without adding moisture and turn the frosting a lovely pink hue. They’re available at Target, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and most major grocery stores.

How to Make Strawberry Cake Ahead

If you’re preparing for a party or a birthday, you can make the cakes ahead of time. Let them cool completely before wrapping tightly in plastic wrap. Store in the fridge for up to three days or also wrap in aluminum foil and freeze for up to a month. 

You can also make the whole cake up to a day ahead of time. Cover and store in the fridge, then let warm up slightly on the counter for 30 minutes to an hour before serving.

One really nice thing about this strawberry cake is you can make it all year long. It gets most of its flavor from jam and freeze-dried strawberries, which capture strawberry flavor in shelf-stable form. I’ll be making it for my February birthday next go-around.