Quick and Tasty Strawberry Cake

As a kid, I always enjoyed sneaking into the kitchen and messing around with ingredients until I came up with something my family and I could eat. Now, it would sometimes go great and give me a tried and true recipe, like this strawberry cake, but it would also sometimes fail miserably. I’m sure my sister can remember the doughnut incident.

This recipe is one of the easiest ones I’ve created and it’s a great shortcut for a relatively difficult dessert. It should take no longer than an hour and thirty minutes! The reason why it’s extremely simple is because we will be using boxed cake and the ingredient list doesn’t surpass seven items! And– if you’re lucky enough, you might already have these items ready at hand! So, let’s jump right in! 

Total Time: 1hour30min 

Active Time: 1 Hour

Ingredients: 

• White cake mix (any brand; I prefer Duncan Hines Classic White) 
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup water
• ⅓ cup vegetable oil 
• 1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract 
• 1 pound fresh strawberries 
• 32 Oz heavy whipping cream 
• 3 tablespoons confectioners sugar 

Method: 

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and grease and flour two pans. I prefer using two 9” pans. 
2. Place your eggs, water, oil, and vanilla extract in a bowl and mix until just homogeneous. 
3. Add your cake mix and continue to mix until all lumps are gone and the batter is smooth. Don’t overmix! 
4. You can use a kitchen scale for this, but I’ve made this plenty of times so I just measure by eye; divide the batter between the two pans. 
5. Place the pans in your preheated oven for 24-29 minutes. I’ve found the sweet spot to be just about after 26 minutes, but every oven is different. 
6. While your cakes are in the oven, we’re going to start prepping our WASHED strawberries. 
7. Divide your strawberries into three groups. 
8. For the first group, you’re going to roughly chop them into small pieces that we will conceal within some of our whipping cream. 
9. For the second group, neatly chop them by quartering the strawberries then chopping along the width of it. Those will go between the cakes; sticking to the whipped cream. 
10. For the third group, you can get creative and slice however you like; those are for the decoration on top. 
11. Now that your strawberries are ready, whip your cream using an electric mixer until you get STIFF PEAKS. You’re going to want to be able to hold the bowl over your head without anything falling out, but also beware of overmixing. 
12. At this point, I like to fold in the confectioner’s sugar into the already whipped cream, sweetening it just a little bit. 
13. Divide your cream, leaving ⅔ in one bowl and ⅓ in the other. Add your strawberries from group one into that bowl and mix until they’re concealed. 
14. By now, your cakes should be out of the oven. You must wait for them to cool completely before doing anything. If you’re in a rush, you can speed up this process by placing them in the freezer for 10-15 minutes. 
15. Once everything is cool, release one of the cakes onto the dish you want to serve your cake in and make sure to level it. This will give it the cleanest look possible. You can either use a cake leveler or just simply run a large knife through the cake; using the most shallow side of the cake as your guide. 
16. Once leveled, spread the whipped cream with the strawberries running through it, covering the entire cake 
17. At this point; I like to add the strawberries from the second group to cover the entirety of that first whipped cream layer, then I top that off with a relatively thin layer of the plain whipped cream. It sounds like a lot of whipped cream, and it is! But this is definitely a cheat day dessert. 
18. For the second cake, I like to flip it onto a cutting board or an area with big space, then I level it and place it on top of that first layer, the bottom part facing up (this is to give you the cleanest look possible) 
19. At this point, you have full disclosure on what you want to do and how you want to decorate your cake. I like to cover it entirely with whipped cream, do some piping bag action (which is literally just a Ziploc with the tip cut off) and then fancily slice up some strawberries. The point is, no matter how you decorate this cake, it’s going to come out phenomenal! Enjoy!