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To put it plainly: strawberries are delicious. In peak season, they’re wonderfully tangy, plump, and sweet, with a delicate floral flavor you can’t quite find in any other berry. But when it comes to capturing all the delicious flavors of strawberries in baking, things can veer off-course pretty fast.
It’s not as easy as adding more strawberries. In fact, if you wanted to make something bursting with strawberry flavor, you’d need an absurdly large amount of fresh strawberries on hand. Not to mention, the time it’d take to modify the recipe to account for all the extra fruit and liquid. It’s no wonder so many strawberry cake recipes lean into store-bought cake mix or Jell-O to amplify the bright berry flavors and pretty pink hues we all love.
While many boxed cake mixes are delicious on their own right, nothing compares to baking something from scratch. And now, thanks to baker and recipe developer @thepancakeprincess, I’ve just learned a brilliant tip that ensures the most flavorful and vibrant pink strawberry cakes without enlisting the help of cake mix.
Why You Should Use Freeze-Dried Strawberries for Baking
According to @thepancakeprincess, the key to better strawberry cakes is to use freeze-dried strawberries. The reason being, strawberries, like many other fruits and vegetables, are high in water. When baked, they release some of that moisture and inevitably lose their flavor in the process. Opting for freeze-dried has the opposite effect: It locks the flavor into the cake's crumb without losing the integrity of the bake. The result? A wonderfully moist, pillowy, and strawberry-forward cake.
What Are Freeze-Dried Strawberries?
Freeze drying is a dehydration process used to preserve food. It starts by freezing an ingredient, then lowering the surrounding pressure to allow the water content to transform from ice to vapor without passing through a liquid phase. By forgoing melting, the ingredient can retain and preserve almost all of its original qualities, like its structure, flavor, and nutrients.
Since freeze drying removes nearly all of a food’s water content, what gets left behind is a light, airy, and crispy shell highly concentrated in flavor. It differs from air-dried fruit, which is what you’ll find in the nuts aisle or nestled in bags of trail mix. These still retain about a third of their original water content, so they look and taste closer to their fresh form.
Luckily, freeze-dried fruit is pretty commonplace these days, and you should be able to find it in the snack aisles at major grocery stores.
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How to Bake With Freeze-Dried Strawberries
The easiest way to incorporate freeze-dried strawberries into your baking is to start with your favorite white cake or yellow cake recipe for a single-layer 8-inch cake. Then, it’s as easy as blending 3/4 ounces of freeze-dried strawberries until fine, which you can do with a mortar and pestle, blender, or spice mill, then tossing that into your cake batter. Yes, it’s really that simple!
And, because freeze-dried strawberries have already lost all their water content, you can add as much or as little as you want into a recipe without jeopardizing the cake's final texture. The only thing to keep in mind is that freeze drying doesn't remove any of the acids found in fresh strawberries. Without water, the acids are much more noticeable. This is a good thing because it lends a lovely pop of brightness to baked goods, but you'll want to be careful not to go overboard.
The best part of this tip? It can be applied to other types of fruit. Remember: Freeze-dried means intensified flavor. So, if you're looking to impart bigger and bolder fruit flavor to your cakes, muffins, cupcakes, or even frosting, try adding the freeze-dried versions to the recipe and get ready to enjoy seasonal desserts all year long.
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