Strawberry Cake {A Scratch Recipe}
We have fallen in love with this flavorful scratch Strawberry Cake.
This strawberry layer cake has become one of our favorite recipes, with its moist and soft cake layers and big strawberry flavor.
There are so many frostings that would pair perfectly with this cake, but cream cheese frosting may be my favorite.
Table of Contents
Why we Love it
- Moist, tender cake layers
- We love cakes with fruit for their light and refreshing flavor (as with our pineapple cake, lemon cake recipe, raspberry cake, and so many more!)
- Wonderful strawberry flavor from strawberry puree and strawberry extract, as with our strawberry coconut cake and more.
- Plenty of batter for three 8 inch cake layers
- Works great with frozen strawberries, making it a perfect year-round cake!
- Makes a great birthday cake recipe, special occasion cake, and more.
Frostings for Strawberry Cake
This moist strawberry cake is bursting with wonderful strawberry flavor, and tastes amazing with these frostings and fillings (and many more)!
- Strawberry Filling
- Chocolate Buttercream (if making a chocolate covered strawberry cake!)
Fresh vs. Frozen Strawberries
You don't have to wait for strawberry season to enjoy this delicious strawberry cake. It calls for strawberry puree made from fresh or frozen strawberries.
We think you'll love the fresh strawberry flavor that more than a cup of strawberry puree lends to the cake.
Reverse Creaming Method of Mixing
This cake calls for the Reverse Creaming Method of mixing, for a moist and tender cake. The ingredients are added in a different order than the traditional creaming method, resulting in a slightly tighter crumb and velvety texture.
*If you would prefer to use the traditional creaming method for this fresh strawberry cake recipe, you can find it in the Chocolate Covered Strawberry Cake recipe!
How to Make Strawberry Cake
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. (This recipe uses the reverse creaming method as is explained above.)
Grease and flour three 8 x 2 inch round cake pans - I like three layers because it gives us an extra layer of filling. *We also like to line our prepared pans with parchment circles.
- In a separate bowl, combine room temperature eggs, strawberry puree, vanilla, strawberry extract, pink food coloring (if desired). Blend together with a fork.
- In the mixing bowl for your stand mixer, hand whisk the dry ingredients (cake flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, and salt) for 30 seconds to combine. With your mixer on low to medium speed, and using the paddle attachment, add the pieces of butter, a few pieces at a time, also add the oil at this time. Mix until the dry ingredients form moist crumbs that look like coarse sand.
- Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl. With the mixer on LOW speed, SLOWLY add ½ of the egg mixture/wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, increase the mixer to medium speed and beat for 1 ½ minutes, the batter will be thick and fluffy.
- Scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl, then add the remaining egg mixture in 2 pourings, beating 20 seconds after each. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl and pour the cake batter into prepared pans.
Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake layer comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pans on wire racks for 10 minutes. then turn out. This recipe makes about 7 ½ cups of batter.
Will this Strawberry Cake Recipe work for Cupcakes?
Yes, you can make strawberry cupcakes with this recipe, however they will have little to no dome. This true for many of our scratch cake recipes.
Decorating the Strawberry Cake
Decorate the Strawberry Cake however you like with your favorite strawberry frosting or a recipe that pairs well with strawberry flavor. We crumb coated our cake with Cream Cheese Frosting and then immediately piped the spiral patterns that you see in the photo using a star tip 21.
I love the piped-all-over look and it is also very forgiving! Simply start piping in the center and spiral outward, clockwise as many until you reach the size that you want. Repeat until the cake is finished ;0)
Doctored Cake Mix Version of Strawberry Cake
If you prefer a doctored boxed cake mix recipe, we have a great one for you: Strawberry Cake: Doctored Cake Mix Recipe.
This easy strawberry cake always gets rave reviews and uses real strawberries along with other flavorings for a delicious strawberry flavor.
More Strawberry Cakes
We've made several delicious strawberry cakes over the years! Here are just a few of our favorites. You can find our full collection of favorites here: Strawberry Cakes, Fillings, and Frostings!
Some of our favorites are our Homemade Strawberry Cake (which contains cream cheese in the cake batter for a velvety texture), Strawberry Bundt Cake, and Strawberry Pound Cake.
Our Strawberry Shortcake Cake (with pound cake layers and fresh strawberries) as well as our Strawberry Lemonade Cake are popular spring and summer cakes also!
Have you made this? We would LOVE for you to leave a ⭐️ rating as well as a comment and photo below! We really appreciate your feedback!
Strawberry Cake from Scratch
Equipment
Ingredients
- 4 large eggs room temperature ( can warm the eggs by putting in a bowl of warm water for 5 minutes)
- 1 ½ cups (340 g) strawberry puree .I used frozen strawberries that were lightly sweetened, you could also use fresh. Puree the strawberries in food processor or blender
- 1 teaspoon (4g) vanilla extract
- 2 teaspoons (8g) strawberry extract
- 2 to 3 drops AmeriColor Pink or your pink coloring of choice optional but makes for a prettier shade of pink
- 3 cups (342 g) cake flour
- 1 ¾ cups (350 g) granulated sugar
- 1 Tablespoon plus ½ teaspoon 14 g baking powder
- 1 teaspoon (6 g) salt
- ¼ cup (50g) vegetable oil
- 1 stick (113g) unsalted butter, slightly softened. (We cut butter into small pieces so it can be added slowly during mixing process. I cut mine into ½ to 1 inch slices onto waxed paper on the countertop, letting it soften only about 5 to 6 minutes.)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Grease and flour three 8 x 2 inch round pans
- In a separate bowl, combine eggs, strawberry puree, vanilla extract, strawberry extract, pink coloring (as desired). Blend together with a fork.
- In the bowl of your mixer, hand whisk the dry ingredients (cake flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, and salt) for 30 seconds to combine. With your mixer on low to medium speed, add the pieces of butter, a few pieces at a time, also add the oil at this time. Mix until the dry ingredients form moist crumbs that look like coarse sand.
- Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl. Method is important when using Reverse Creaming, so with the mixer on LOW speed, SLOWLY add ½ of the egg mixture to the dry ingredients, increase the mixer to medium speed and beat for 1 ½ minutes, the batter will be thick and fluffy.
- Scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl, then add the remaining egg mixture in 2 pourings, beating 20 seconds after each. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl and pour into prepared pans.
- Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pans 10 min. then turn out.
- Makes 7 ½ cups batter
I want to do this recipe with blackberries and can't find a blackberry extract. What if I make more purée and reduce it down to the 1-1/2 C, concentrating the flavor. Would that mess up the moisture content of the cake?
Hi Julie, I think cooking blackberries down and concentrating the flavor could work. Just replace the 1 1/2 cups strawberry puree for blackberry puree. I'm not sure how many blackberries you will need. In the Lemon Blueberry Cake Recipe that Melissa just posted, I used 1 cup blueberries 2 T. sugar and 1/4 cup water and reduced it to 1/2 cup to use making blueberry buttercream. It is just going to vary depending on how long you cook it. If you reduce it to less than 1 1/2 cups just add a bit to water to bring it back to that measurement. I would love to know if the blackberry flavor comes through if you give it a try. Hope all goes well.
Hi Melissa. Planning to make a strawberry cake for friends birthday this wknd, and have been scouring the web for recipes. Found one that reduces the puree down to concentrate the flavor, see in another comment someone ask about doing the same with blackberries. In the other recipe you puree 1 pound strawberries and reduce a cup of that down by half and use just that for flavoring. My question is about the liquid ratio. From the BlackBerry comment you seem to be saying add the same amount of reduced strawberry as not reduced. Also found a frosting recipe that uses freeze dried strawberries instead of puree and extract, no extract in cake either. What's your opinion on the exchanges?
Please help me understand where I missed the adding of the wet ingredients to the dry?! Also, I saw that it says to add the eggs 3 different times. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a step somewhere?!
Hi Marvette, We think this recipe as written has good strawberry flavor without the step of cooking it down in a reduction. Are you wanting to leave out the strawberry extract? We have never used freeze dried strawberries so I can't respond to that.
Hi Salayna, Under the directions the 3 rd entry is about combining the wet ingredients. This recipe uses the Reverse Creaming Method which is quite different from the conventional method of mixing. Melissa has a video on Reverse Creaming, below is a link, I think you will find the video very helpful
https://www.mycakeschool.com/reverse-creaming-method-of-mixing-a-cake-video-tutorial/
I watched the video & just realized that the term "egg mixture" was referring to the wet ingredients as a whole, including the strawberry pure. I have tried 4 different recipes in the last 48hrs so my brain was a little fried...smh! Thank you!
With the reduction method you would leave out the extract. Using the extract isn't something I'm opposed to, just wanted to try to get full flavor with strawberries only. I'm going to be doing the chocolate version of this cake, and am very excited to be able to present it to my friend.
Hi Marvette, We added strawberry extract even with the reduction method. We just like the extra boost of flavor. I think your friend will love the cake.
I made the cake with blackberry reduction and the taste was what I wanted, but it was very dense. This could be because the moisture content of blackberries is different than strawberries. I may try a second go at it, adding either water or milk. All my recipe-testing cakes are half-sized, so at least I didn't mess up a giant cake.
On the other hand, I covered and filled it with your pipeable cream cheese frosting, which was perfect!
Can this recipe be double for a half sheet cake?
Hi Tavey, We have had several members post that they have doubled the recipe with no problem.
hello, for a 12 "cake how many times should I double the recipe? How do you make the strawberry puree?