You’ll love this classic vanilla pound cake with a swirl of strawberry hibiscus sugar and a brilliant pink glaze.

Boring bundt no more: this modern take on a classic recipe is as bold in flavor as it is beautiful. With a ribbon of strawberry-hibiscus sugar throughout, and a gorgeous fuchsia glaze, this cake is sure to turn heads (and delight tastebuds) wherever it goes!

I was recently gifted a beautiful bundt pan, dare I say the most beautiful bundt pan I’ve ever seen (my jaw dropped when I saw someone post a cake made with this pan in our facebook group, and I expressed as much in the comments. My lovely friend and neighbor was clearly paying attention as he got me one for my birthday a few days later).

I knew I had to do this gorgeous pan justice. Being the indecisive soul I am, I put it to the group to help me decide what kind of bundt cake I should make first. Strawberry won, hands down (with marzipan coming in a close second, so that will probably be my next endeavor!)

The group had spoken. Strawberry bundt cake it is!

I tried and I tried (really, I tried so hard) to get a strawberry pound cake to work. But whatever tweaks I made to the recipe, the texture just wasn’t quite right. From very very not right (think dense, gummy mochi cake) to close but still slightly off-putting. Something about adding strawberries in any form (fresh and/or freeze dried) to a cake does weird things to the texture. Flavor-wise it was spot on, but I just couldn’t get the texture right. I guess there is good reason most of the strawberry cake recipes you see these days use strawberry Jello.

Despite my failures, I still couldn’t shake the idea of a strawberry bundt cake in my beautiful new bundt pan, so rather than drive myself crazy trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, I changed my perspective. Instead of making the cake itself strawberry flavored, I stuck with a tried and true classic pound cake and then added swirl of strawberry-hibiscus sugar. It’s still got an intense strawberry flavor (especially once you add the glaze), but it preserves the perfect crumb of the vanilla pound cake.

And speaking of that glaze… it’s as bold in flavor as it is in color. Made from the same strawberry hibiscus sugar as the swirl inside the cake, the stunning fuchsia color is thanks to a concentrated hibiscus tea (when I did the same thing with plain milk the results were a slightly pinkish mauve).

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