How to Make a Strawberry Lemonade Cake That Melts in Your Mouth

Hey, I'm John Canel and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making a delicious melt in-you mouth strawberry lemonade cake. So, let's get started. First off, we're making a flavorpacked strawberry reduction. Grab three cups of strawberries. That's 500 g. We're going to hull them and give them a chop. Cutting these into smaller pieces, but really it's up to you. You want the strawberries to break down in a timely fashion, and for that, you want smaller pieces. This cake is very popular on the website, especially when strawberries come into season. On the inside, a beautiful jammy layer of a strawberry reduction. The cake itself is a melt in-you mouth zingy lemon cake. And it's all coated with a strawberry lemonade

frosting made with fresh strawberries and fresh lemon. Strawberries are chopped. Can transfer these into a small to medium pot. To sweeten things up, half a cup or 100 grams of granulated sugar and 1/4 cup of fresh lemon juice. It's about two lemons. One4 of a cup exactly. Pour that in. Now we can take our strawberries onto mediumigh heat. Grab a wooden spoon or spatula and we're going to be stirring while these cook down. And while it cooks down, we can start the cake. Preheat your oven to 350 so it's nice and hot. Grab three 8-in cake pans. Give them a spray and line the bottoms with parchment rounds. Now, in a medium bowl, we can combine the dry ingredients, starting with 3 cups or 360 g of allpurpose flour. And I'm using a scale for best results.

If you're using measuring cups, fluff the flour up, sprinkle it into the measuring cup, and level it off. Never scoop. Perfect. To puff things up, two teaspoons of baking powder. One and two. Half a teaspoon of baking soda. This will react with the lemon in our cake, which is an acid. By the way, if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button. There's two new recipes every week. And for some contrast, half a teaspoon of salt. Grab a whisk, give it a mix, and then we can just mix it up and set it aside. And do not forget to keep stirring your strawberries occasionally.

This smells so good. This in combination with the lemon cake. Perfection. And by the way, you can totally make the strawberry reduction ahead of time. Often times I'll step recipes out. So the strawberry reduction, for example, I could do a day ahead of time. It could hang out in the fridge. It needs 2 hours of chill time. So either start it first or make it a day ahead. Into the bowl of my stand mixer or a big bowl if you're using a hand mixer. 1 cup or 226 g of room temperature butter. And of course, room temperature does not mean the ambient temperature. It means the butter is fairly soft. So, it's bendy. You can

press down into it. It's not melted. It's not rock hard. Often times, I'm baking on a cold winter's day. And even if the heat's on, the countertops are often ice cold. So, this heat just gets sucked out of everything, and you have to warm things up in the microwave constantly to get room temperature. Pop your paddle attachment on and we're going to mix this on medium until it's nice and creamy. Once your butter is nice and creamy, we can add two cups or 400 grams of granulated sugar. This will sweeten and soften the cake. When you reduce sugar in a baked good, the baked goods get breier and harder in texture aside from

being less sweet. So, you can totally reduce the sugar if you want. Just know you'll make that compromise. We're also adding in 2 tablespoon of lemon zest. The sugar will agitate the oil out of the zest and give us a really beautiful, bright lemon flavor. That's the zest of about two nice lemons. This stuff is gold. It's so good. Pop that in. I'm also adding in 2 tsp of vanilla. Now, we're going to mix this on medium for about 5 minutes until it's light and fluffy. You can scrape the bowl down as needed.

Halfway through, this strawberry reduction has gotten much more thick and jammy. So, it's almost ready. I've been stirring it, and this is riding up the side of the bowl. So, let's scrape it down. Especially the bottom of the bowl. I want everything fluffy and wonderful. My strawberry reduction is cooked down. It's thicker and jammy. So, I took it off heat and I'm letting it hang out in the pot for just a minute before I transfer it to a bowl. Loosely cover and chill for at least 2 hours. If you don't want seeds, go ahead and press it through a sie. I don't mind. So, I'm going to have it as is. While this finish is mixing, I'm going to crack four eggs into a bowl so I can

make sure there are no shells. One, two, three. These can go in one at a time. Make sure the first one mixes in before you add the next. And I have an eggy mixture in the middle with a butter mixture on the side. So, it's time to scrape the bowl down. M. The scent of strawberry and lemon is definitely in the air right now. It's very nice. Number It's nicely mixed. But one final scrape down. The lemons we zested are also going to get juiced because this cake needs 1/4 cup of freshlysqueezed lemon juice. It's time to combine the wet and the dry. We're going to add the flour in three additions, alternating with one

cup of whole milk. Have your mixer on its lowest setting possible. One/3. Half of the milk. Another third. Another half of the milk or the remaining milk. And the last of the flour mixture. I'm stopping the mixer while I have streaks of flour because I want to scrape the bowl down. Just give it a quick scrape down. Now we can add the final touch. 1/4 cup of fresh lemon juice. Okay, almost completely mixed. I'm going to finish it off by hand. Scrape the bowl down and just fold any remaining bits of batter together. Now we can divide the batter equally between our

three 8in pans. You can eyeball this or use a scale. I'm very pro scale here because the more evenly your cake batter is distributed, the more evenly they will bake. The scale is your best friend in the kitchen. It does so much for you. 913 832. Basically equal. Now, grab an offset spatula and we're just going to level this out. For the best results possible, I highly recommend using cake strips. These are just damp fabric strips that you wrap around your cakes. They give you a nice even bake with beautiful flat layers and fluffy soft sides. When you don't use them, you often have cakes that are domed and a little bit more crusty on the edge.

Wrap your cake strips around your layers. You can buy these online or make them at home. I have a whole video just about cake strips and what they do, which you can click up here for. My cake layers are ready to go into the oven 350 for 30 to 35 minutes or until the centers will spring back when gently pressed or a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. And you go. My cake layers have cooled and my reduction has set, so it's time to make a delicious buttercream. Into the bowl of your stand mixer, it's time to add two cups or 454 g of room temperature unsalted butter. It's nice and soft here.

Okay, this is an American buttercream, but American buttercreams can be delicious and perfect if you beat them properly. The problem with American buttercream always happens when people don't beat the butter enough. Air hasn't been whipped in and they are a little bit dense and overly sweet and gritty. We're not going to make that happen. Pop your whisk attachment on and we're going to mix this on medium high until it is light and fluffy. The color right now is a beautiful light yellow. It'll be almost an off white and the consistency will be very different. So about 5 minutes. 5 minutes later and I have a fluffy, beautiful, cloudlike bowl of butter. If I grab a little bit here and you come

close, you can see the original color of the butter and the much whiter whipped butter. I'm going to scrape the bowl down. This is the basis for a beautiful American buttercream. Now, now the mixer will be working on low and I'm going to add half of the powdered sugar. This is 8 cups of sifted powdered sugar. So adding about a cup at a time while mixing on low until half the sugar is in. It's 900 g altogether. If you notice that everything is just hanging out in the whisk, just one quick jolt to high to knock it out.

Okay, half my sugar is in. So, it's time to add six tablespoon of our reduction. That's it's basically a third of a cup. On the inside, pink and lovely with natural strawberry color. On the outside, very pale pure butter. So, it's time to scrape it down. Now, we can add the rest of the powdered sugar in gradually, about a cup at a time. Still mixing on low. Right now, I have a very thick buttercream and it's missing some flavor. So, we're going to add 2 tablebspoon of fresh lemon juice while mixing on low. Just gradually add that in. And we can also add an additional 2 to 3 tablesp of heavy cream. If your reduction is on the looser side, you will need less cream. If it was on the firmer side, or if you added a little bit more powdered sugar, you'll need more.

Okay. I'm going to increase to medium low and beat this for a minute until it's nice and fluffy. By the way, if you wanted to, once you're adding in the powdered sugar, you could switch to a paddle attachment. They're both going to do the job. This will not get as impacted with buttercream. It's easier to clean off. This one tends to kind of fill up, so you might just have to knock it out by going to high for a second. Okay, this looks like a strawberry lemonade cloud. It tastes delicious. Everything is ready, so we're going to grab some piping bags and a star tip and assemble this cake. My first layer is on a cake plate. And I've reserved about a cup of

frosting in a piping bag with the tip snipped off. This will be for a little wall between each layer. I have more than I need here, too. I also reserved about two cups of buttercream for the decorations, but I'm going to whip this up just before I pop it into the piping bag, just before I'm ready to use it. If you let your buttercream sit for even 10 minutes, gets really frothy and it just doesn't have that beautiful piping edge. It's frustrating. Onto the first layer, I'm going to add half a cup of frosting. Smooth that out to a nice thin even layer. Pipe a circle around the edge. This will hold all of our reduction in.

Now I'm adding three tablespoons of the reduction onto the first layer. That's two and three. Spread that out into an even layer. M smells delicious. And I love the way this cake looks when you cut into it. So pretty. Okay, let's add the next layer on top and repeat the process. Half a cup. Spread it out. You can see that frothy texture here. I do not like this for cake decorating, but it's on the inside, so it doesn't matter.

Last layer goes on. And at this point, take a look and make sure it's pretty level and not leaning. Now, we cover this completely, but I'm going to re-hip my buttercream before I use it because I want it to be nice and smooth. And now, after a little bit of whipping, you can see my buttercream is much smoother. Completely intomb your cake in buttercream. Now, I'll plop it on the top and work it down the side. If you're making this on a warm day and your cake is too jiggly, pop it into the fridge for 5 or 10 minutes before you frost the outside. The top of this cake is getting a lot of decoration, so it can be a very thin layer of buttercream. Don't worry about making it too thick.

My cake was leading to the side, so I just pressed it back in with my offset spatula. And now I'm smoothing the side. Again, when you do this step, you're roughing it out to get full coverage. Then to get an even layer, and finally to smooth. A bench scraper is your best friend here. Once you're in a good place, rotate the cake and smooth the side out. Then you can come back in and fill in any gaps. Now we can pull in as we turn to get a crisp edge. My cake has been successfully covered. Now we can get the decorations together. So I'm going to whip the rest of this frosting up and pop it into a piping bag fitted with a small open star tip. And

today I'm using a 4B tip, but really any star tip will do. I have a lot of buttercream left over, so I'm going to do some decoration scheme on the bottom and the top. You can do little dots, but today I think I'm going to do waves. Try my hardest to make this look good. Starting at the bottom, go up, down, up, and down. And you can see the frosting is nice and smooth because it was re-whipped. Now that it's been covered, I can do a tight rope for the top. Just little circles as I pull away. This piping bag is super full, so it's much more difficult to make this controlled. You should half fill your piping bag.

Little curls or ringlets of buttercream. Just try not to go over the edge. You can use a cake turntable, but honestly, you don't need it here. you'll just have some screeching to deal with. If you go over the edge, gravity will pull the buttercream down and it'll start sagging. This would be so pretty. I love it. [clears throat] I love seeing the strawberries coming through in the buttercream. Okay, and the last bit. This looks nice, but we have some more reduction and I have some more strawberries. So, I'm going to add a pool of the reduction and pop a bunch of quartered strawberries on top. Smooth that out to the edge. And

honestly, this looks pretty as is. You don't have to add more strawberries. In fact, I should point out you could do whatever you want for the decoration scheme of this cake. It could be a swoopy organic affair and look really pretty. Add h haved or quartered strawberries and just pop those all over the top. If you're making this cake in advance, add the strawberries on at the very end because they won't really keep. They'll dry out in the fridge. Without the strawberries on top, your cake will last up to 4 days in the refrigerator, or you can wrap it really well and freeze for up to 3 months.

Just try and get some good coverage and fill the top up. You can also add little stars with the extra buttercream if you please. This looks beautiful, but we're not going to cut the cake yet. It needs about half an hour in the fridge to set up so it doesn't fall apart when you cut it. Once your cake is set in the fridge, give it a slice. And just like that, it's ready to enjoy. That cake melts in your mouth and it's so zingy and bright with beautiful flavors. I hope you get a chance to make this delicious cake. And if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button and check out my spring and summer