Nothing fills a parent with panic like a birthday cake request that sounds hard to find and hard to make. It’s December and both my own son and his BFF had birthday parties this weekend I was baking for and they both asked for strawberry cake. Not a strawberry shortcake or a Victoria Sponge… oh no. The cake itself had to be pink. Cake one was a two layer cake based on a really easy dairy free vanilla cake recipe using apple cider vinegar to activate the soda. We folded in the freeze dried, and ground strawberries at the end. The result was moist but a little dense. Not a bad start to this adventure.

Day two, my son’s birthday I couldn’t get him to commit to a cake shape or really any details. Finally I started just mixing a good ol fool-proof wacky-cake which is simple, chocolate and another of these apple cider cakes. I made a vanilla buttercream icing with freeze dried strawberry powder again and assembled a quick 6″ layer cake where I added a layer of strawberry compote in the middle. Boom, done in a little over an hour and super easy. It had good texture but honestly, other than adding color, the freeze dried strawberries were not great.

Today was the outdoor birthday party at a park. I needed to sort out strawberry cupcakes and settled on what I will declare as my most successful cake of this three cake weekend. This time I used the King Arthur Classic Birthday Cake for both the cupcakes and the icing. And I made another strawberry compote with a bunch of strawberry jam and some frozen strawberries and a bit of cornstarch. The cake recipe yielded 24 cupcakes PLUS a 6″ round cake (which I froze for some other cake emergency). It was the perfect cake texture and it now going to be my go-to for cupcakes.

For the strawberry part, I cored the cupcakes with a paring knife (not all the way to the bottom, I took out maybe a 1″X1.5″ deep round hole). I blobbed in some compote and then iced the cupcakes with the chocolate buttercream icing.

I also have to mention how much I like this buttercream recipe. The hot water helps prevent any teeny butter blobs from surviving the mixing process. I find it hard to get buttercream icing really smooth in a chilly winter kitchen and this mod over the usual cold milk was a game changer. I could have added more icing sugar and stiffened the icing so it piped with more definition but I liked the ease of soft pillowing frosting that was more chocolate forward.