Yellow Butter Cake + A Frosting to Fight Over

This is installment II of the recipes from last week.

CAUTION: the following recipe involves a dangerously addicting combination of sugar, butter & chocolate, but holey moley is it delicious.

Sadly, this past wednesday was the last practical in the lab. I am now forced to invent some new excuse to bake sweets. Since I had only ever baked cookies for the class, I wanted to finish this semester off with something more special and I think cakes are special, especially when made from scratch. It couldn’t just be any old cake, I wanted the perfect cake. I needed to create the most righteous flavor pairing between cake and frosting. So off I went to get some inspiration from the internet. After days of searching and bookmarking I made my decision: Yellow butter cake with a dark chocolate, espresso, cream cheese frosting. HOLY CRAP, it was good. I didn’t really get any good pictures of it because it was dark by the time I started to make the cake and the iphone has a hard time in the dark. Regardless of my inability to capture this cake in it’s full glory, please take my word for it and bake this cake.

The recipes were adapted from two different blogs: Slow Like Honey and Tasty Kitchen.

Yellow Butter Cake

Recipe from: Slow like honey

Fills: two, 9 inch cake pans

ingredients

• 2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pans
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for pans
• 1 1/2 cups cake flour (not self-rising) (or make your own by subtracting 2 tblsp of flour and adding 2 tblsp of corn starch and then sifting that mixture three times!)
• 1 tbsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 3/4 cups sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
• 1 1/4 cups milk

Procedure

• Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.
• Spray cake pans with oil and lightly flour the entirety of the inside. Then, revert back to kindergarten and trace the shape of your pan bottoms onto parchment paper, and using your safety scissors cut out the circle you have just made. Then set the cut out circle inside your pans and lightly oil and flour that as well.



• Now, sift together the two kinds of flour, baking powder and salt.
• In the bowl of a stand mixer, using the paddle attachment, cream the butter and the sugar until it becomes fluffy and beautiful.
• Add the eggs to the mixer bowl, one at a time, with the mixer on low speed.
• Add the vanilla.
• Now add the flour mixture, in three parts, and the milk, in two parts. You want to make sure you begin and end with the flour mixture.
• Portion your cake batter between two pans (and possibly some in a bowl for yourself…). I underfilled my cake pans so I could make a third smaller cake in my heart shaped spring form pan, which I got on my birthday because I made the boyfriend buy it because it was probably the cutest thing I’d ever seen. Hey it was only like 7 dollars, don’t judge me. Pop them in the oven and rotate halfway through baking to ensure even cooking. The whole cake bakes in about 32-35 minutes depending on your oven. You’ll know its done when a cake tester can be inserted into the middle of the cake and comes out clean.



• Once done transfer cakes to a wire rack and cool for 20 minutes and remove parchment paper from the bottom. (so here is where I kinda messed my cakes up…I don’t own a wire rack to cool things on so I tried to cool it on my inverted dish drainer, which didn’t work and I basically destroyed the right side of the first cake layer. Then, too afraid to screw the next one up, I just put second cake layer upside down on a plate thinking I would just let it cool and then try and flip it over. WRONG. Instead the top of the cake stuck to the plate.



But always remember…..frosting covers/fixes almost all cake issues 🙂

• Let cool completely before frosting.

Dark Chocolate Espresso Cream Cheese Frosting

Adapted from: Tasty kitchen

Ingredients

• 1 stick butter (softened)
• 8 ounces, cream cheese, softened
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 4 cups powdered sugar, sifted
• ½ cups dark chocolate cocoa powder, sifted
• 6 tbsp brewed coffee, cold ( I used an espresso roast)

Procedure

Make this ahead of time so it has at least 5 hours to set up in the fridge and become the right consistency. If you find that it’s not thick enough, go ahead and add more powdered sugar and when you’re ready to frost, throw it in the mixer and beat it until it becomes more fluffy!

• Sift together the powdered sugar and dark cocoa powder.
• In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the butter and cream cheese until combined and lusciously smooth.
• Add the vanilla.
• Add the sifted sugar/cocoa mixture, 1 cup at a time and beat until incorporated each time.
• Add the coffee.
• Put in a container and refrigerate for at least 5 hours. Or eat it all that moment, which is fine…because I said so.

As a side note, this makes a crap ton of frosting and I still have some left over in my fridge (shhhh the boyfriend doesn’t know about it though). I would say you could half the recipe but I don’t know if that would mess it up or not…for those of you daring bakers out there give it a shot, let me know how it turns out!

The final product! I didn’t manage to get a picture of the main cake, but it really was amazingly delicious.