chocolate chocolate cake

Okay, neither the recipe for the cake or the frosting belong to me, but they are so good together.  This is my go to chocolate cake.  The cake is dark, moist, and not overly sweet.  The frosting is fluffy, super chocolaty, easy to apply, and makes plenty extra.  I personally like to make sandwich cookies with the extra chocolate frosting spread thick between two graham crackers.  So good!  My parents used to make them with extra frosting when I was little.  Keep the extras in the fridge to help firm them up.

Last week was a milestone birthday for my Mupma.  She'd totally kill me if I said the exact age.

I wanted to make the cake a bit fancier for her birthday and I had plenty of extra frosting, so after frosting the cake I put some in a piping bag and piped the edges, then lined it with chocolate chips.  I still have about 2 ups of frosting left so I foresee some graham cracker sandwiches in my near future.  :)

I ordered a small silicone alphabet mold a while ago from amazon (I heart amazon!) and used it to make the "Happy Birthday" and the hearts.  It set pretty quickly, but just to be safe, I made the letters ahead of time.  This was the first time I'd used the mold, so next time I know I need to tap it more after I've poured the chocolate in to try and get rid of the dreaded air bubbles.

Liam LOVES his Mupma.  He kept jumping into her lap all evening, and helped blow out the candles.  Ignore the candle covered cake for the moment, that's all for the next post.

Liam immediately pulled the blown out candles out of the cake and insisted that everyone needed to eat the frosting off of them.  "Because that's what you do!"

Someone was pretty excited to officially get his own piece of chocolate cake.  He ate the whole piece (inhaled actually) and ran around like crazy the rest of the evening with a chocolate fu manchu.


Chocolate Cake
recipe by Betty Crocker
prep: 20 min
bake: 35 min
cool: 1 hr
12 servings

Ingredients:

• 2 1/4 cups AP flour
• 1 2/3 cups sugar
• 3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 2/3 cup cocoa powder
• 1 1/4 cups water
• 1 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 2 large eggs

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease bottom and sides of two 9 inch pans.
2. In large bowl, beat all ingredients with electric mixer on low speed 30 seconds, scraping bowl.  Beat on high speed 3 minutes, scraping bowl occasionally.  Pour equally into pans.
3. Bake 30 to 35 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean.  Cool in pan 10 minutes, remove from pans and cool completely on wire racks for 1 hour.  Frost.

note: the cake puffs up, so you might want to trim the tops off.  For this cake I only trimmed the top off the top layer, just because I wanted the top to be flat for the birthday message.  It's really up to you.

My Favorite Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

recipe by Cooking Classy

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups butter, at room temperature (I like to use 1 cup unsalted and 1/2 cup salted)
• 3 3/4 cups powdered sugar
• 3/4 cup cocoa powder*
• 3 - 4 Tbsp heavy cream or half-&-half
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions

• In a the bowl of an electric stand mixer, fitted with whisk attachment (paddle attachment works too. Whichever you use just pay attention the the shade of the butter), whip butter on moderately high speed until very pale and fluffy (nearly white in color), about 6 - 8 minutes, occasionally scraping down sides of the bowl. Sift in cocoa powder then add in powdered sugar, 3 Tbsp heavy cream and vanilla and mix on low speed until combine, scrapping down the sides of the bowl as needed and adding up to 1 tbsp additional cream to thin if desired. Increase mixer to medium-high speed and whip mixture until pale and very fluffy about 4 - 5 minutes, occasionally scraping down sides of the bowl.
• Note that similar to whipped cream the frosting will lose some of its "fluff" after a few hours, it will still taste the same it just loses some of the air that was whipped into it (similar to whipped cream how it loses it's stabilization after a few hours). It is best to prepare and use within a few hours for best (fluffiest) results.
• Recipe Source: Cooking Classy