Lemon Strawberry Cake

Today I'm going to share an amazing scratch Lemon Strawberry Cake with you!

This perfect summertime dessert brings together two favorites of mine: moist, delicious, lemon cake layers and a sweet Strawberry Buttercream!

Toss in some freshly sliced strawberries into the filling and you have an instant classic!

*For the reverse of this cake, check out our Strawberry Lemonade Cake, which has strawberry layers and lemon frosting!

How to Make Lemon Strawberry Cake

For the layers of our Strawberry Lemon Cake, we're using our Scratch Lemon Cake Recipe. You can find the full recipe card at the bottom of this post. Here is a quick look at our steps!

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease and flour two 8 or 9 inch cake pans. Note that this lemon cake recipe can also be made into three 8 inch cake layers (as we did with our Lemon Orange Cake)
• In a medium sized bowl add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and zest of 2 lemons. Whisk to blend and set aside.

• In another bowl, add the milk, vegetable oil and lemon juice, and lemon extract. Whisk to blend and set aside.
• In the bowl of your mixer, mix the softened butter until smooth. Gradually add the sugar and mix on medium speed 3 to 5 minutes until it is lightened in color and fluffy.

• Add the eggs one at a time, mixing until the yellow of the yolk disappears.

• With the mixer on low speed, add the flour mixture and the milk mixture alternately. Begin and end with the flour (3 additions of flour and 2 of milk). Mix just until combined and smooth.
• Pour the batter into the prepared pans, smoothing the tops with the back of a spoon.

• Bake at 350 degrees. If using two 8 inch pans, this will take about 30-35 minutes. Bake until a toothpick can be inserted and comes back out clean or with just a few crumbs attached. The centers should also spring back when lightly touched.

Strawberry Buttercream

For the filling and frosting, we used our strawberry buttercream frosting. This is a flavorful frosting made from butter, confectioners sugar, a pinch of salt, and pureed strawberries, (plus strawberry extract if you'd like).

It is simple and delicious. You may also like the Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting that we used in our Homemade Strawberry Cake Recipe, which is a bit less sweet.

Keep this Strawberry Buttercream recipe in mind for all sorts of cake and cupcake flavors! It's amazing with white cakes, yellow cakes, and of course strawberry cake too! You can find all of these in our Cake Recipes section!

Assembly of the Lemon Strawberry Cake

After placing the first Lemon Cake layer on our pedestal, I spread it with a layer of Strawberry Buttercream. (Homemade whipped cream is another good option for filling.)

We topped this with a layer of sliced fresh strawberries!

Slice as many strawberries as you'd like, but keep your slices far enough from the edge of the cake to ensure that they will not spill out when the cake is stacked.

You can pipe a dam of buttercream (using a piping bag with the tip snipped away), about ½ inch from the edge of the cake layer to keep everything contained if you'd like! I probably should have done this step just to be one the safe side.

After adding our strawberry filling and strawberry slices, I added our second layer of lemon cake and frosted the cake with a thin crumb coat of strawberry buttercream, followed by a layer of decorative piping.

**I like to freeze the cake just after crumb coating for about 15 minutes to firm everything up before decorating.

Decorating the Cake

I piped buttercream spirals all over the top of the chilled, crumb coated cake using a Wilton 21 star tip. I decorated around the sides of the cake with a braided buttercream design. (Find these star tip piping techniques in our free tutorial!)

Decorate the cake however you like! We topped the cake with a few beautiful strawberries for an extra pop of color.

Here is our pretty, sliced cake!

Recipe FAQs

More Lemon Cakes & Frostings to Try!

We love all things lemon, and have an ever-growing collection of favorite lemon cakes! Some our most popular are Lemon Velvet Cake, Lemonade Cake, and Lemon Coconut Cake. 

As for lemon fillings and frostings,  don't miss our easy Lemon Buttercream, delicious Lemon Curd, and Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting!

Strawberry Lemon Cake

BY Melissa and Bebe

We love the combination of Strawberry and Lemon in this moist and delicious layer cake!

Prep Time: 20 minutes mins

Cook Time: 30 minutes mins

Course: Dessert

Servings: 15

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Ingredients

For the Lemon Cake Layers

• ▢ 1 ½ sticks (170g) unsalted butter, softened
• ▢ 1 ½ cups (300g) sugar
• ▢ 4 large eggs room temperature (if cold, place in a bowl of warm water for 5 min.)
• ▢ 3 cups (342g) cake flour *if you do not have cake flour, see note below
• ▢ ½ teaspoon (3g) salt
• ▢ 1 ½ teaspoons (7g) baking powder
• ▢ ½ teaspoon (3g) baking soda
• ▢ 1 cup (242 g) milk
• ▢ ¼ cup (57g) lemon juice
• ▢ ¼ cup (53g) vegetable oil
• ▢ zest of 2 lemons
• ▢ 1 Tablespoon (10g) lemon extract
• ▢ *** ** If you don't have cake flour for each cup of all purpose flour (or plain flour in the UK) remove 2 Tablespoons of flour and replace with 2 Tablespoons of cornstarch. For this recipe, measure out 3 cups all purpose flour, remove 6 Tablespoons and replace with 6 Tablespoons cornstarch. Whisk to blend.

For the Strawberry Buttercream (*If doing a lot of piping, increase by ½)

• ▢ 2 sticks (226g) unsalted butter, softened
• ▢ 6 cups (690g) powdered sugar
• ▢ ½ teaspoon 3g salt
• ▢ ¼ cup plus 1 Tablespoon pureed strawberries add more to reach your desired spreading consistency (This is approximately 3-5 strawberries as the sizes vary)
• ▢ 1 teaspoon 4g strawberry extract (optional) use if the buttercream needs more strawberry flavor

Miscellaneous:

• ▢ Additional sliced strawberries to place in the filling optional but it adds great flavor & whole strawberry/strawberries for decoration on top.

Instructions

For the Lemon Cake Layers

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
• Grease and flour two 8 inch pans ( my pans are 2 inches deep). You could also divide the batter between three 8 inch pans for slightly thinner layers which allows for an additional layer of filling.
• In a medium sized bowl add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and zest of 2 lemons. Whisk to blend and set aside.
• In another bowl, add the milk, vegetable oil and lemon juice, and lemon extract. Whisk to blend and set aside.
• In the bowl of your mixer, mix the softened butter until smooth. Gradually add the sugar and mix on medium speed 3 to 5 minutes until it is lightened in color and fluffy.
• Add the eggs one at a time, mixing after each addition until the yellow of the yolk has blended in.
• With the mixer on low speed, add the flour mixture and the milk mixture alternately. Begin and end with the flour (3 additions of flour and 2 of milk). Mix just until combined and smooth.
• Pour the batter into the prepared pans, smoothing the tops with the back of a spoon. Bake at 350 degrees. If baking three 8 inch pans, bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes. For two 8 inch pans, bake at 350 for 30 to 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean or with only a few crumbs attached. Let the cakes cool in the pans 10 minutes then turn out.

For the Strawberry Buttercream

• Cream the softened butter until smooth.
• Gradually add the powdered sugar and pureed strawberries beating at medium speed until blended.
• Continue mixing on medium speed another 3 to 4 minutes, scraping the sides of the bowl occasionally
• Slow down the mixer to very slow (#2 on a KitchenAid) and mixing another 1 to 2 minutes. This will eliminate air pockets. The buttercream will become very smooth.
• If the buttercream is too thin add more powdered sugar, if too thick add more puree or a bit of milk.
• Any extra strawberry puree can be spread between the cake layers
• Makes 4 to 4 ½ cups

Assembly of Cake

• Place the first cake layer on your cake board/pedestal
• Spread with Strawberry buttercream, followed by strawberry slices. (Don't allow the strawberries too close the the edge, or pipe a dam of buttercream to keep the juices from escaping.
• Top with the next cake layer and repeat. Frost the cake with strawberry buttercream.
  

Notes

Freezing: Layers can be baked in advance, wrapped individually with plastic wrap and foil, and frozen for up to three months!

To thaw, move to the kitchen counter, still wrapped.

Allow to sit for 30-45 minutes before unwrapping and thawing to desired amount for assembly.

 

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