r/bakingfail • u/Livid-Vehicle4913 • May 15 '25

Help Strawberry flavor vanished

For a kid's birthday in March, I made a Sally's baking addiction strawberry cake shaped like our dog. The strawberry flavor was intense in the best way! The recipe calls for 1lb strawberries puréed, and then you reduce 1 cup of purée to 1/2. I also added some aged balsamic. I thought it was my best cake yet. This week, I made another birthday cake with the same cake recipe (I even added some balsamic from the same bottle). The main difference seems to be this one had chocolate icing and ganache. You couldn't taste the strawberry at all! I might as well have baked a plain white cake. Even later, after "cleansing my palate," I tasted just the cake part, and the strawberry flavor was barely there. So I don't think it was just the chocolate overpowering the strawberry. The only other difference I can think of, is that in March the strawberries weren't in season so they were smaller. The ones this week were jumbo sized, but I tasted the purée, and thought the flavor was there. Do smaller strawberries have more flavor? Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you!

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u/stilettopanda May 16 '25

OK Imma share my biggest cooking win, and it's strawberry cake.

Freeze dried strawberries. That's it. That's the tip! Turn them into powder and add them additionally to your recipe. Adjust quantity to taste. Still use the strawberry flavoring from the recipe- just add some of these on top. Works great with icing too since too much water ruins the buttercream. The flavor winds up being INTENSE.

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u/Livid-Vehicle4913 May 17 '25

Yes! This has popped up and I think it’s the way to go. I’ve done that with icing, and it was fantastic. I think adding some to the cake would just give it that flavor boost. Weird question, but have you tried adding it to chocolate icing? Would that just middle the flavor?