Cereal Milk and Strawberry Jam Cake

Fruity Pebbles, to be specific.

I’ve been asked a number of times to share some of my more elaborate layer cake recipes, but I have often thought if I did — would anyone make them? That was uncharitable. If you’re here with me, I believe you’re someone who wants to take the scenic route — to savor the process. This cake is a process, but the reward is like a fragrant strawberry in July, or a cold bowl of cereal on a warm day.

The core flavors here are Fruity Pebbles and strawberry jam. The jam quality here is important, so I recommend making your own.

The Fruity Pebbles flavor appears in a couple different ways. In the first, the cereal is steeped in milk overnight, which gets turned into crème pâtissière for layering between yellow cake. The second is in the buttercream. Rather than trying to infuse it, I’ve made a close approximation by introducing vanilla, lavender and lemon zest, which to me, captures the essence of the cereal a little more elegantly.

This is a lengthy recipe, but in it, you will get a reliable yellow cake that can be used again and again, and detailed guidance for making crème pâtissière and swiss meringue buttercream. All of these will carry you far in your cake-making career.

The jam can be prepared up to a couple weeks in advance. The crème pâtissière can be prepared the night before you want to assemble, as can the cakes (just wrap them tightly in plastic). I recommend using the swiss meringue buttercream right away — bringing it back to a uniform room temperature and re-whipping it is a whole process of its own.