Turn Your Vanilla Cake From Drab To Fab With Fresh Fruit

Vanilla is a beautiful, complex flavor in its own right. But sometimes, a plain vanilla cake needs a little more. Take inspiration from the light, fluffy, fruit-topped cakes found in bakeries throughout Asia. A fresh, vibrant selection of strawberries, raspberries, kiwi, and mango — or whatever your heart desires — adds both flavor and style to the simplest cake. And the additional fruit is more nutritious than cake alone.

Plus, decorating a cake with fruit requires less skill than fondant flowers or piped trim. A haphazard mess looks just as nice as a carefully arranged selection. Just use your imagination: Thinly slice fruit and use cookie cutters to create shapes. Arrange the fruit in funky patterns or deck your cake with elaborate, Pinterest-worthy designs.

You can always use fruit to upgrade a grocery store cake or give a boxed mix personality and panache — but baking a cake from scratch is always worthwhile. We recommend baker Mark Beahm's recipe for a classic vanilla cake.

The trickiest part? Dealing with leaky, weepy fruit (looking at you, strawberries). Fruit contains a lot of water, and sugar — like the sugar in your frosting — draws it out. When decorating cakes with fresh fruit, it's easy to end up with a swampy mess.

To keep the cake looking as fresh as possible, add the fruit right before serving. But if you have to finish it off a few hours beforehand, there are a few ways to keep it looking fresh. Pick fruit that's almost underripe and dry it well after you wash it. Some bakers even recommend wiping strawberries with a damp paper towel instead of rinsing them, since they can absorb extra moisture through their skin. Layer leakier fruits on top of less watery ones, or top your cake with a thin layer of chocolate or jam to keep the juice from seeping into the frosting. Some bakers recommend tossing fruit in sugar to help draw the liquid out before using it as a garnish.

You can also seal berries in sugar: Follow a recipe for tanghulu, the TikTok-famous traditional Chinese treat. Making the candied berries is harder and more dangerous than it looks, though. Molten sugar reaches 350 F — over 100 F hotter than boiling water — and fuses to the skin. If you've never worked with hot sugar before, do your research, have a bowl of ice water ready, and never, ever use a microwave.