Easy strawberry butter cake with fresh berries. Buttery sponge cake with strawberries sunk into the base, with their little red bottoms peeking through.
The six-slices-of-cake cake
It's such a good, tender and rich cake with fragrant, jammy berries in a generous berry-to-batter ratio. Once, when very stressed, I ate six pieces of it in one sitting to make myself feel better. It certainly made me happy! The bathroom scales the next morning were a bit of an anticlimax though.
The basic recipe is a riff on a simple pound cake, or quatre-quarts, used as a thin base for luscious summer berries. Any soft fruit can be used instead of strawberries: blueberries, raspberries, cherries or even peaches or apricots cut into chunks. Fresh berries or stone fruit make it a joyfully summery cake.
Cake flour mix
So called ‘cake flour’, not commonly available to buy in the UK, is a mix of plain flour with a little corn or potato flour. It makes the batter lighter and more fluffy.
This is optional, but if you do have some corn flour or potato starch (the two are mostly interchangeable), then why not?
How to make cake batter
It does make your work easier if you use an electric mixer, handheld or standing, to beat the butter with sugar. But a wooden spoon and elbow grease will do that job decently too.
That’s the start: then eggs are added one by one, beating or mixing and scraping the sides of the bowl. The batter will curdle horribly at that point so after each egg you can add a spoonful of the flour mix to ease it off. On the other hand I’ve learned over the years to ignore curdling altogether with no detriment to my cakes.
The previously prepared mix of the two flours, baking powder and salt will go in next and you don’t need to be gentle about it if using a mixer – just make sure the speed is down so it doesn’t go ‘fuff!’ all over the kitchen. At this point the batter will become smooth and homogenous.
Strawberry arrangement
The tin, a square brownie-type about 23cm/9 inch, should be lined with a strip of parchment so you can remove the cake more easily (unless your tin has a removable bottom). Cut a strip as wide as the tin but longer so its sides sticks out.
Once you’ve spread the batter evenly over the parchment – there will not be a lot of it but that’s the point: fruit over batter – you can arrange the berries.
Personally, I always prefer smaller berries, to eat and to bake. You can top them and arrange, bottoms up, on the base. But if your preference and strawberry supply is for larger fruit, halve them and place cut side down.
Baking, cutting, storing
The cake takes 45-50 minutes to bake which sounds long, but you want the strawberries to be jammy and the sponge baked through around them, rather than a soggy mess.
Once out, let it cool in the tin then carefully remove using the parchment wings. A generous dusting of icing sugar won’t go amiss.
Cut it with serrated knife, into 9 generous or 16 dainty portions.
I can never decide which is better: to have one large or two (three, four, six…) small ones. Which do you prefer?
However cut or even uncut, the cake will last about 4-5 days in the fridge, lightly covered with parchment.
More strawberry cake recipes
Fresh strawberry Bundt cake with yoghurt batter and mashed strawberry icing is as delicious as it is pretty. The cake batter might curdle but feel free to completely ignore it: the outcome will be successful all the same.
Classic Victoria sponge sandwich cake filled with fresh strawberries and whipped cream, also known as strawberry shortcake sandwich.
Strawberry crumble cake, the easiest cake batter in the world thickly covered with fresh strawberries and finished with crunchy crumble topping. The only summer cake recipe you'll ever need.
More summer fruit cake recipes
Almond cake with fresh raspberries, flavoured with cinnamon and lemon zest. It’s flourless, dairy and gluten free, yet wonderfully airy and soft.
Blueberry and cream sponge cake is a magnificent dessert. Blueberry Victoria sponge, with layers of lightly roasted blueberries and whipped Chantilly cream is easy to make but very impressive to serve.
Summer cherry cake with a hint of cinnamon and minimal effort involved. This cake mix is pathetically simple – it takes 5 minutes to prepare and always comes out well.