I’m trying to find a good/reliable recipe for a strawberry cake to use as a base for my daughter’s birthday cake. She has a rather specific request of a strawberry cake to be frosted in blue and white stripes like one of her stuffed animals in the shape of a cat.
Last year she wanted a chocolate cake so I used Stella Parks" Texas sheet cake without the nuts and it was a thick and sturdy sheet cake which took well to cutting pieces out to assemble into a cat shape and then I frosted in a pink strawberry frosting of some form. I don’t recall but probably buttercream. All off the recipes I’m finding are “light”“airy” “Fluffy” etc and I’m just wondering if any bakers out there could point me run the right direction
I like the look of the Sally’s baking addiction cake- and I like that she says it can be made in a 9x13 pan. I’m thinking I might scale up the recipe and bake it in a 10x15 as I used a half sheet pan’s worth of cake on last year’s cat cake. These are last year’s version- some wine might have affected the final result in addition to it being very warm so the cat was melting
If you have a sturdy vanilla sheet cake recipe you like, you could just add powdered freeze dried strawberries (TJs has them) or the trick from Sally’s recipe where she cooks down fresh strawberries so the batter doesn’t get watery and the flavor intensifies (though if it were me I might experiment with a 6’" cake where I used strawberry jam for the sugar and the strawberries both – since it’s a kid cake)
What an adorable cat cake (listen if you’re going to try and make a cat, wine is definitely called for)
We just made the Stella parks Strawberry cake yesterday! It turned out great- not overly “fluffy” but deliciously moist and with good strawberry flavor. She does have a note about using an aluminum paddle and discoloration. We did not clean our paddle pristinely ( I saw the note after my daughter started mixing) and the cake was not perfectly pink. We’ll take that extra step next time.
– since it’s a kid cake)
(listen if you’re going to try and make a cat, wine is definitely called for)