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
Hi Fredia, Yes, you can use two 9 inch pans, just divide evenly between the 2 pans. Not quite sure of the baking time for 9 inch pans and this amount of batter, check at around 25 minutes. It will be done when a toothpick into the center comes out clean or with just a few crumbs attached.
Hello,
I’m making your cake right now and it seems to have come out flat and spread to the sides of my pans. Do you know why or how that could happen? I used fresh strawberries and added 1tsp of almond extract n the batter along w/1 tsp of vanilla extract. Other than that, I followed your recipe.
Hi Tamara, I am sorry you had a problem. The 1 Tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon baking powder may have been left out or it was out of date. Another thought is too much of the liquid ingredients was added. I am sorry for the disappointment.
A lot of recipes I see cook the strawberry puree down is there a reason you guys don't?
Also did you guys strain out the seeds before adding?
Last question, I took my daughter strawberry picking and not I am stuck with strawberries that are getting dark and mushy, They still taste delicious just not pretty do you think those strawberries would work good in this recipe?
thanks for the help and your great recipes!
People cook and reduce strawberries to intensify the flavor. We think this recipe has good strawberry flavor without that step. If you did cook and reduce the berries you would still need 1 1/2 cups to have enough liquid for the recipe. I can't be sure of how overly ripe your berries are, if the taste is still good I think they should be ok. We don't strain out the strawberry seeds. Hope you will enjoy the recipe.
Can this recipe be used as a Bundt cake?
Yes, this can be baked in a bundt pan. Lower the oven rack to next to lowest position. If your bundt pan is shiny metal or light colored non stick, bake at 350 degrees. If using a dark colored pan bake at 325 degrees. Keep an eye on your cake, it is done when a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean or with just a few crumbs attached. Hope you will enjoy the recipe.
Is this cake moist and soft? Most strawberry cake recipes I've come across are dense
We have had good feed back on this recipe. This recipe uses the reverse creaming method, if you are not familiar with it, you might like to watch Melissa's video. Link below.
https://www.mycakeschool.com/reverse-creaming-method-of-mixing-a-cake-video-tutorial/
Would this work with all purpose flour as well?
Hi Denise, If you only have all purpose flour, you can make cake flour. Using all purpose flour, for each cup of flour in a recipe, remove 2 Tablespoons flour and replace with 2 Tablespoons cornstarch (corn flour in the UK). This recipe calls for 3 cups of cake flour so you will measure out 3 cups of all purpose flour. Remove 6 Tablespoons and replace with 6 Tablespoons cornstarch. Whisk to blend and proceed with the recipe. Are you familiar with the Reverse Creaming method that this recipe uses? If not, you might want to watch Melissa's video, link below.
https://www.mycakeschool.com/reverse-creaming-method-of-mixing-a-cake-video-tutorial/
I made this recipe today, and I noticed that it had a flour or baking powder aftertaste to it. I triple checked the amount of baking powder because I’ve never baked a cake where I used that much before, and I spooned in the cake flour measurements so that my measuring cup was “packed.” I’m not sure why I would have gotten that flavor. Any suggestions?
I also used parchment paper rounds at the bottom, so it wasn’t the flouring of the pan.
Thank you!