This homemade strawberry cake recipe uses fresh strawberries, tart lemon curd and beautifully smooth and silky Swiss meringue buttercream.
Why You'll Love It
- It pairs sweet, fresh strawberry cake layers with tart lemon curd filling and vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream.
- It doesn't use artificial strawberry flavouring. This cake is made with real strawberries!!
- It uses simple ingredients that can be found at your local grocery store. No fancy, funky ingredients here. Just standard but delicious ingredients!
I took inspiration for this cake flavour from Tessa Huff and used tips from Sally at Sally’s Baking Addiction blog on how to intensify the strawberry flavour in your cake layers.
For my strawberry cake recipe, I used my classic vanilla cake recipe with oil and tweaked it a bit to become delicious, moist strawberry cake layers. I used homemade lemon curd to give this cake the perfect summer tang of zesty lemon flavour and paired it with Vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream.
Keys to success for this recipe:
- Ensure all of your ingredients are room temperature. This is imperative to having your ingredients incorporate together well —especially since we’re using oil in this recipe!
- Cream your butter and sugar until they are light and fluffy! Don’t skip this step. It’s important to allow time for these to whip together in order to create a light and fluffy cake. The sugar whips air into the butter as it creams together.
- Don’t overmix your batter! We want to mix just enough to incorporate our ingredients. If you over mix you will end up with a dense cake - yuck! Find out more about cake flour and the mixing process in this blog post.
- Be careful when making your lemon curd. You do not want to leave it unattended and end up with cooked eggs in your curd!!
How to Assemble
Begin by placing your first cake layer onto a cardboard cake round.
Pipe a ring of buttercream around the perimeter of the cake. This acts as a barrier for the lemon curd to prevent it from spilling out the sides of the cake when we stack it.
Spoon tart lemon curd into the centre of the buttercream ring. Make sure not to over fill your cake layer with lemon curd. The lemon curd should be below the height of the buttercream ring.
Place your next cake layer on top and repeat the process until you've stacked your cake. Apply a crumb coat and frost your cake.
Enjoy!
If you try this recipe, make sure you take a photo and tag BAKED by Blair on social media and use the #bakedbyblair. I would love to hear how you enjoyed the recipe, so comment below! If you want to pin this recipe and save it for later, go ahead and click the pin button above and save it to your favourite desserts board on Pinterest! ENJOY!
Other Refreshing Desserts to Try:
Luscious Lemon Loaf Cake Recipe
Homemade Strawberry Cake Recipe
Equipment
- Electric Stand Mixer
- Rubber Spatula
Ingredients
- ½ cup unsalted butter at room temperature
- ½ cup vegetable oil
- 1½ cups granulated sugar
- 5 egg whites at room temperature
- ½ tablespoon pure vanilla extract
- 3 cups cake flour sifted
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ⅔ cups strawberry puree
- 1 cup buttermilk at room temperature
For the Strawberry Puree
- 2½ cups chopped strawberries
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 325 degrees F. Spray three 6-inch cake pans with non-stick spray and set aside.
- Into the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle attachment, beat butter and oil together for 5 minutes until they are unified.
- Add sugar into the mixture and beat on medium to high speed until light and fluffy. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.
- With the mixer on low speed add egg whites in one at a time followed by the vanilla. Beat on high until mixture is smooth and light in colour.
- While your mixture is mixing, sift flour, baking powder, and salt into a medium bowl.
- Add in ½ cup of strawberry puree and mix until combined. You may also add a drop or two of pink food colouring if you wish.
- With the mixer on low speed, add one third of the flour mixture into the bowl and mix until just combined. Scrape down the bowl and add one half of the butter milk and again mix until just combined. Repeat this process, beginning with the strawberry puree. Begin and end with the flour mixture. Do not over mix or your cake will become quite dense.
- Distribute cake batter evenly between three 6-inch cake pans. I like to use a kitchen scale to ensure batter is divided equally.
- Bake for 35-38 minutes, or until knife comes out clean. Each oven is slightly different, so I suggest setting your timer to 30 minutes and watching carefully from there!
- Cool on cooling rack for 10 minutes before inverting and removing cakes from can pan to cool completely.
For the Strawberry Puree
- Chop fresh strawberries. Place in food processor and puree.
- Transfer puree to stove top and reduce over low- medium heat for about 15-20 minutes or until the mixture is thick and red in colour.
- You should end up with roughly ⅔ cup of reduced strawberry puree.
Jean B says
So delicious! I had to turn this into cupcakes because #pandemiclife but they turned out so delicious - the strawberry flavour is so good. I wasn’t sure how many strawberries I had so I made extra sauce which is also amazing on its own!
Blair Braz says
Incredible. It's wonderful to know they covert to cupcakes so well! Thank you for trying them!!