Strawberry and Thyme Layer Cake

In this eggless birthday cake, three layers of vanilla sponge cake are infused with thyme syrup before being sandwiched together with a decadent strawberry cream cheese frosting.

A not-too-sweet, visually striking birthday cake for a 70th birthday celebration.

A 70th birthday cake for a man

The challenge: to create a visually impressive, tasty, subtly indulgent birthday cake for my partner’s 70-year-old father, Terry.

Oh, and it needed to be egg-free.

Challenge accepted.

I believe birthday cakes should somehow reflect the personality or interests of the recipient, so for this cake, I took inspiration from Terry’s woodturning workshop.

The wood turning workshop

The first time I saw this workshop my heart did a thing.

Being an ex-pat Canadian I have a nostalgic fondness for sawdust and wood. The smell of sawdust itself, that slightly sweet sappy scent of wood, brings me right back to the Canadian forests and the village I grew up in. Firewood. Chopping kindling. The sawmill. Lumber.

It smells like home.

There’s something to be said about seeing someone’s ideas come to life out of a solid piece of wood.

Each piece starts the same, with unlimited potential.

A bit like people.

Plus, those little curls of wood shavings!

Each one of those has been made, carefully, by hand. The by-product of art.

Care. Craftsmanship. Skill.

There’s a beauty in that.

Eggless birthday cake recipe

This blog post isn’t about wood shavings though, it’s about a cake for a wood-turner who recently turned 70.

This birthday cake, inspired by this strawberry and thyme cake recipe, needed to be egg-free, so I turned to this egg-free vanilla cake recipe as a starting point as it had so many good reviews.

It didn’t disappoint.

Thyme syrup-soaked vanilla sponge cake

I made three light and fluffy eggless vanilla sponge cakes the day before, wrapping them in clingfilm overnight to keep them from drying out.

Before assembling the cake, each layer was drizzled in homemade thyme syrup, made by simmering sugar, water, fresh lemon juice and fresh thyme sprigs together until thickened. This was left to cool before being strained.

The thyme syrup has two purposes: first, it helps keep the cake moist as I find egg-free cakes tend not to have the same moist crumb texture as their eggy cousins. Secondly, the syrup adds a subtle sophisticated lemon-thyme flavour to the cake.

Strawberry cream cheese frosting

The three layers of thyme-syrup soaked sponge were then sandwiched together with an easy strawberry cream cheese frosting (inspired by this recipe).

Truth be told, I made this cake twice just to make sure it was going to be good enough. The first time I misread the recipe ingredients for the frosting and I ended up using equal quantities of butter and cream cheese. The second time I went with the original twice as much cream cheese as the butter option (pictured).

To be honest, the first batch of frosting was much nicer and easier to work with. So, that’s the recipe I’ve included in the printable recipe card below.

I opted for a naked frosted-style cake to tone down the overall sweetness. I liked how the naked cake looked almost like a wood texture.

This three-layer showstopper of a cake was finished off with fresh strawberries and thyme sprigs. I think it’s a rather natural-looking, creative, subtly sophisticated eggless birthday cake for a 70-year-old man.

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