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Jun 22, 2023

You’ll love this one

I am a big Texas sheet cake fan from way back. It’s a large-format chocolate

I am a big Texas sheet cake fan from way back. It's a large-format chocolate cake with a fudgy glaze-like frosting and is basically everything I want in dessert: It's tasty enough to please a crowd, it can be made with minimal fuss, and it's as great for a special occasion as it is for any given Tuesday.

Get this recipe: Vanilla Sheet Cake With Strawberry Glaze

Because I love the easy assembly and epic nature of the cake just as much as I love its flavor profile (chocolate on chocolate!), I was drawn to develop a vanilla version, with a strawberry-flavored glaze. And what a version it is. Fluffy white cake, with a tender melt-in-your-mouth crumb, is assembled in a single bowl, baked in less than 20 minutes and topped, while still warm, with a simple glaze flavored with freeze-dried strawberries.

I’d love to share an extensive list of tips and tricks for making this fabulous berry-glazed pink cake, but it really is a breeze to make with nary a pitfall. So instead, I will list its attributes, as one would in a love letter, as there are many.

A one-bowl cake is not only the easiest and fastest way to assemble a cake, but it is also the method that those of us who abhor doing dishes turn to the most.

Here, I turn the traditional cake mixing technique on its head in the name of one-bowl baking. The recipe calls for mixing together the wet ingredients before the dry, whisking the leaveners and salt right into them and then folding the flour in last. By assembling the cake in this manner, you avoid the need for an extra bowl in which to whisk together your dry ingredients. And because the flour is folded in on its own, as opposed to with your other dry ingredients, you don't have to worry about evenly distributing your baking powder and salt. They already are!

Instead, you can focus on gently mixing in the flour, until just a streak or two remains, producing a cake with the lightest and airiest of textures.

This recipe calls for 2 eggs and 2 yolks. We could use 4 whole eggs, but the 2 whites will provide plenty of structure for the cake's diminutive stature. The extra yolks give the cake a particularly velvety texture, as well as a rich flavor and an extra tender crumb.

Although it packs a punch, almond extract doesn't necessarily give your dessert a nutty, almond flavor. Instead, it heightens the flavors already present. Here, almond extract makes the cake taste more complexly of vanilla, deepening the flavor in a nostalgic way.

Like the Texas sheet cake, this vanilla-strawberry number is baked in a half-sheet pan, a large, shallow pan that's 13-by-18-inches. Once baked, the cake is maybe a tad over an inch in height, and once topped with a tangy pink glaze, each slice provides nothing short of the perfect ratio of cake-to-frosting. A sheet cake baked in a traditional 9-by-13-inch pan is sometimes so tall that a single bite is often more cake than topping; a half sheet pan makes such a tragedy an impossibility (thank you very much).

The glaze here, like in a traditional Texas sheet cake, is assembled by boiling butter and evaporated milk and then whisking in confectioners’ sugar. In the traditional cake, cocoa powder is boiled along with the butter mixture, but here I’ve substituted freeze-dried strawberries for a slightly tart twist. But whether it's made with cocoa or something fruity, the magic of this glaze is in the fudgy texture that boiling the milk and butter produces. It thickens when whisked with the sugar and once poured over the cake and left to set, forms a crisp top with a toothsome middle. The contrast of the glaze's soft, almost chewiness with the fluffy, light cake is what makes this cake so special.

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Many cakes want you to wait until they cool to room temperature before you frost them. Here, upon removing this cake from the oven, you quickly assemble the glaze and spread it over the still-warm cake a few minutes later. This not only makes for an extra soft, moist layer where the warm cake hits the warm glaze, but also means that you’ll be eating cake stat, as this thin cutie cools down quickly.

Although flavoring the glaze with real fruit sounds great, doing so would require reducing the fruit to concentrate the flavor and remove moisture. Freeze-dried fruit, on the other hand, can be ground to provide a potent flavor and wonderful color And while you can sift the pink powder to remove any errant fruity chunks that your grinder misses, I love the way the bits speckle the cake.

This easy vanilla party cake is sure to become your new favorite treat. If you are already yanking bowls — or rather one bowl — from the cupboard and assembling your ingredients, then my love letter to it has achieved its goal.

Get this recipe: Vanilla Sheet Cake With Strawberry Glaze