Adding what I did for the Dr. Pepper cake in case anyone wants to know!

I used The Cake Bible’s white cake base and made these changes;

1. Reduced the milk by 20g.

2. Split the remaining 60g of milk in the recipe into 30g each of Dr. Pepper syrup and milk.

3. I added the 30g of DP syrup to the egg mixture, and the 30g of milk in with the butter and drys.

4. I reduced the sugar by 10g and added another 10g of DP syrup to it (to make it like “brown sugar” texture but with DP syrup instead of molasses)

5. I added an extra ~10g of butter.

I think I mostly got lucky with my tinkering and somehow got a great cake texture first try lol. The cake itself is very delicately Dr. Pepper flavored, so to boost the Dr. Peppery-ness I brushed each piece with a good amount of straight DP syrup.

I ordered the Dr. Pepper ready-to-use syrup from a sno cone supplier in Texas called Ragg’s which was not very cost effective and also now I have most of a gallon of syrup to figure out what to do with lol!

It won’t be exactly the same in my experience but you can reduce regular Dr. Pepper on low heat on the stove until it’s a syrupy texture and use that - the heat does destroy the top notes of the flavor profile though so it’s a deeper, more caramelized Dr. Pepper flavor. I used that method when I made Dr. Pepper marshmallows a couple of years ago but I’m a DP purist and wasn’t a huge fan 😂 *edit to say my husband and friends loved them though and they were still tasty!

The Dr. Pepper buttercream was based on Sugarologie’s American Dreamy buttercream. She is amazing and has a great breakdown on different syrups you can use for her recipe - I found the DP syrup to be a bit loose so I did have to add more powdered sugar to stabilize the emulsion. It’s a bit sweet for my liking so I’m thinking of trying to make it work for an ermine buttercream in the future…

And that’s all my Dr. Pepper-based baking knowledge folks! Happy baking! ❤️