When Asian people celebrate — birthdays, graduations, retirement, whatever — there’s likely to be a layer cake featuring fresh strawberries and light, fluffy whipped cream. Such cakes are stalwarts at Asian bakeries, which churn them out daily. But truth be told, the cakes are rather tasteless because they are mass produced with unripe, sturdy fruit. The whipped cream doesn’t taste like much and neither does the cake itself. I’ve been disappointed too many times by these perfect looking cakes. So I bake my own.
Gearing up for my mom’s 92nd birthday luncheon, I dreamt of baking her a pandan cake. My initial thoughts went to a favorite pandan chiffon cake recipe (🆓 on my website). It’s showstopper green and fragrant from the alluring vanilla-coconut flavor of pandan leaf (screwpine, lá dứa in Vietnamese). Baked in an angel food cake mold, pandan chiffon cake is casual. I needed easy-ish celebratory sparkle, a cake I could bake after a day of work and one that would hold up to an 8-hour roadtrip to my mom’s house. 💖
In the end, I tweaked Shilpa Uskokovic’s strawberry roll cake recipe in a recent issue of Bon Appetit. My creation was a pandan-strawberry cake filled with a coconutty whipped cream. We had twelve adults and two toddlers and when it came time for dessert, I presented the cake. Viola!
My sister Tasha gasped. “You made that?” she said. She’d eaten lots of strawberry and cream cakes with me when we lived near Monterey Park in the 1990s.
Everyone loved the cake, though Linh, my avid baker sister, said, “The cream is delicious but I’d like more cake.” I agreed. You didn’t taste enough pandan. Plus the cake was strangely salty. (Linh had baked a Sicilian orange cake for my mom so our cakes shared the plates.)
Driving home, I sketched out a new recipe for a thicker cake in my head. It took two more bakes before I arrived at the versatile recipe I’m sharing with you today.
Along the way, test cakes went to the neighbors. One neighbor shared a big piece with their grieving best friend who’d just lost her mother to a long battle with breast cancer. The friend ate the biggest piece, I was told.
As I aimed for a thicker cake, I realized that you can’t roll it because the cake cracks and breaks. You can’t see it in the cake on the left but there’s a fissure that kept getting bigger as the cake sat. The neighbors didn’t mind, though!
I tinkered with the batter again and the cake broke during rolling. What to do?
I patched up the cake and pivoted to building a rectangular layer cake. Rory said it looked much fancier than the roll cake. They’re the same cake! 😆 😆 I gifted cake #4 to a different neighbor, who’d just finished an arduous week on a construction project. He couldn’t believe I had baked it and as you see (in his text above), he was so happy.
What began as an Asian celebration cake turned out to be a happiness cake for everyone. Along the way, I made different flavored cakes — pandan, matcha, citrus, and vanilla. I also made two kinds of whipped cream: vanilla and coconut. And yes, I also crafted roll and layer cakes. There were so many wondrous possibilities.
For all those reasons, this is my Strawberry and Cream Dream Cake recipe!
Below you’ll find a versatile, useful package of information containing.
The Pandan-Strawberry and Cream Cake recipe that you can make as a roll cake or as a layer cake (in full text and downloable PDF), with vanilla whipped cream or a coconutty whipped cream!
Three (3) cake variations for Matcha-Strawberry and Cream Layer Cake, Citrusy Strawberry and Cream Layer Cake, and Vanilla-Strawberry and Cream Layer Cake
Pointers for choosing flavorful berries, natural pandan shortcuts, and making fluffy, stable whipped cream that holds up for days
A video tips for making billowy cake batter
Make ahead timing tips so you won’t get cranky
I’m not a skilled cake baker but I mastered this one enough to impress my jaded family and neighbors. It took me a few tries to get here but you’ll make a knockout cake on your first time out because I’ve eliminated a lot of the vagaries.
Bring this dreamy strawberry and cream cake into your dessert rotation.
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