Whatever your occasion for getting together, this vanilla raspberry sheet cake is a perfect no-fuss cake for serving a crowd.
When raspberries are peak in season, the cake is studded with fresh berries, which I keep fresh in a GreenSaver(Opens in a new window) produce keeper until I’m ready to bake. If you can’t get your hands on fresh raspberries, feel free to leave them out! The bulk of the raspberry flavor comes from the secret ingredient in this vibrant pink raspberry frosting: freeze-dried raspberries – available all year long.
My favorite way to make super flavorful frosting is to grind up and sift freeze-dried fruit into powder that folds into the frosting in place of some of the sugar. OXO’s one stop chop manual food processor(Opens in a new window) is the perfect tool for this quick job. Place the small lightweight food processor on a clean dry countertop, slide the base into locking position to suction the food processor into place, add your freeze-dried fruit, and grind into powder. When you’re finished, it cleans up super quickly.
This is my new favorite food processor for small batches and quick jobs – anything from chopping nuts to making guacamole to blending up an herbed yogurt sauce to making freeze-dried raspberry dust. Plus it doesn’t require power so it’s great for taking to picnics to mix up a fresh batch of guacamole on the go!
I reserved some of the powdered freeze-dried raspberries to sprinkle on top of the cake with the dusting wand(Opens in a new window) for a little extra pink magic.
Here I’ve made the cake gluten-free, but if you’d rather not make it gluten-free, bust out your kitchen scale(Opens in a new window). The recipe works just as well if you replace the gluten-free flours with the same weight in all-purpose flour.
While I use my kitchen scale for all my flour measuring, I use OXO’s stainless steel measuring spoons(Opens in a new window) for smaller ingredients like baking powder, vanilla, and salt. These measuring spoons magnetize into a set, easily separate when you need just one, and quickly click back together to help keep your kitchen gadgets drawer in order. No more searching for the missing ½ teaspoon measure!
The cake batter is dumped into a 9x13 cake pan. When you use OXO’s non-stick cake pan(Opens in a new window), you could avoid using parchment paper all together, but I add a sling layer just to make lifting the cake out of the pan onto the cooling rack(Opens in a new window) even easier. This is purely for convenience, as the sides without parchment paper don’t stick at all. The non-stick cake pan helps the cake bake up evenly with a moist delicate crumb studded with fresh raspberries. Swirled with pretty-in-pink raspberry frosting, this no-fuss cake will impress a crowd!
Head over to Snixy Kitchen to see more pictures of this gluten-free vanilla raspberry cake(Opens in a new window) and get the recipe!