Strawberry Upside Down cake
If you’re fortunate enough to grow strawberries and have them come out of your ears, then one of the things you could do with them is make a cake! I made this one on the spot so my measurements aren’t perfect, this is more of what I did. I had 501g of strawberries (weight includes the crowns) and I made a strawberry upside down cake with a strawberry icing.
The cake recipe is my standard go-to cake recipe and it’s so adaptable for so many things, with this one all I’ve done is add little bits of strawberry into the batter and line the bottom of the cake with strawberries, to create the upside down bit.
I hope you’ll enjoy making this or make it your own by changing bits.
Ingredients
**for the cake**
200g butter
unsalted & softened
200g sugar
4 eggs
200g self raising flour
sieved
1tsp vanilla paste
or 1 whole bean
1 lemon
grated zest & juiced
strawberries
to line your tin with
butter
unsalted to grease your tin with, liberally
caster sugar
to line the bottom of your tin with
**for the strawberry glaze syrup**
70g strawberries
quartered, or smaller if big
45g caster sugar
15g water
it's about a tablespoon
**for the icing**
125g royal icing sugar
sieved
strawberry syrup
lemon juice
to thin the syrup a little
Directions
- Start by preheating your oven at 160°C.
- In a big bowl mix together your butter and sugar until creamy and combined
- Next add in your eggs, one by one, until all whisked in and fluffy, don’t over mix.
- Add your sieved self raising flour and mix until combined. Add in the vanilla and lemon zest and juice, mix until combined until you have a smooth batter.
- Butter your cake tin liberally on the bottom (I used a hexagonal tin but I think a springform cake tin would have been better in the end), and pour a thick layer of caster sugar into it, level it out as even as you can.
- Half your strawberries, I used medium sized ones and placed them cut side down (I started off with a nice pattern but that became very quickly, very randomly placed pieces).
- And left over bits of strawberry that isn’t part of your 70g for the syrup glaze, you can either leave aside to decorate the final thing or chop them into chunks and stir them into the batter. I did both, I kept 4 perfect strawberries for decorating, the rest went into the batter
- Pour your cake batter into your prepared tin and put it in the centre of the oven for 50 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean ( I needed another 10 minutes – totalling it to 1 hour)
- You can now prep your glaze by cooking down your 70g of strawberries in a little pan with the caster sugar and water.
- Smash your strawberries a little bit to help break them down once they’re boiling.
- Reduce to a syrup, take off the heat and let cool (do stir it occasionally as it’ll like to stick to your pan otherwise)
- Once your cake is out of the oven and cooled, you can start on the glaze (now in hindsight the cake was just fine as it was so you could leave it as is and pour your syrup over it or use the syrup for a cocktail)
- Add some lemon juice to your syrup to make it a bit more liquid, this will help it mix with the icing sugar, I used a tbsp of lemon juice to do this.
- Sieve your icing sugar into a bowl and add 2tbsp of your strawberry syrup. whisk it together until smooth, I ended up using all the syrup which came to 4tbsp all together.
- Top your cake with the glaze and decorate with the remaining strawberries.
All done!
