Cakes have been my nemesis ever since I entered the world of baking! I am pretty good with breads and pastries, but oh my God! Cakes make me cry like literally cry with tears and everything! First the composition of everything has to be just on point! Then the temperature of the ingredients, then comes the measurement, everything, literally everything in a cake can either make or brake it! One little error, and your cake is either hard like a brick! or it's too soft to be able to hold it's shape.
I have made numerous cakes before, but for baking a cake you have to be on a whole different level of precision and patience. Well don't get me wrong, you can dump everything together and put it in a cake pan and bake a cake, however, you cannot call a bone dry piece of sponge a cake or an extremely fudgy slice a cake! For some people it might be easier, however for me, I have always dreaded them! So when I decided to bake a cake for my niece, for her third birthday, I researched the hell out of the internet. My cousin wanted to make a chocolate cake, for her daughter, with a mermaid/ocean theme on the outside, and so I started looking up some fool/Saumya-proof recipes for a chocolate cake. I thought I need to handle the actual cake first and then we can think about the decoration later! Getting bits and pieces from a bunch of recipes and adding some of my flair to it, I think now I have the perfect recipe for a chocolate cake that I am going to pass on to my descendants, ha-ha.
For the decoration, we decided to make an Ombre shade with pink, green and blue. We had opted out of the whole fondant fuss, since none of us liked the flavor of the extremely syrupy ball of sugar and egg whites. So my cousin bought some non edible cake decorations from Amazon, and we decorated them on the cake. I think it's better to stay away from fondant and use fruits and edible flowers for decoration. I believe that way you get to enjoy the actual flavor of the cake without the fondant interfering with it's rich and sickly sweetness. However if you want to go that extra mile, you can use fondant, it does make the cake look pretty!
I stuck with the pretty and elegant whipped cream frosting instead of butter cream. I like the light and airy texture of the whipped cream, and it supports the cakes rather than interfering with them.
If you've never made a chocolate cake, use this recipe! It'll be your best chocolate cake (Ha-ha, see what I did there?)
Now you will see my cute niece's picture every now and then. Don't let her cuteness distract you. I made this cake, the night before her birthday, and she was up the whole time, almost constantly watching what was I doing! She's the cutest! Ok Let's make this!
Step 1 : Gather your ingredients. This is important, lay out everything in front of you.
Dry Ingredients :-
All Purpose Flour - 3 cups
Dutch Processed Cocoa Powder - 1 + 1/2 cups
Baking Soda - 1 tbsp
Baking Powder - 1 + 1/2 tsp
Salt - 1 + 1/2 tsp
Wet Ingredients :-
Whole Eggs - 4
Granulated Sugar - 2 cups
Buttermilk - 1 + 1/2 cups
Hot Coffee - 1 cup (1 cup water + 2 tbsp coffee)
Vegetable Oil - 1 cup
Vanilla Extract - 2tsp
Extra flour and butter for dusting the pan
9 inch cake pans - 3, OR you can use a big 10 inch cake pan - Dust the cake pans with butter and flour.
Step 2 : In a bowl, add sugar and the eggs and mix it/whisk it, until it's fluffy and pale.
Step 3 : In a separate bowl, add in the buttermilk, and the vegetable oil and mix that together. She wanted to help!
Step 4 : Add this buttermilk-oil mix to the egg-sugar mix. Mix everything again with the electric whisk to make everything homogenous.
Step 5 : Now make sure you have the coffee prepared at this step. It is 1 cup of water and 2 tbsp of coffee. Also make sure when you're at this step, your coffee is hot. Not piping hot, but a moderate hot should be fine.
Drizzle the coffee mix in slowly to avoid the eggs to get curdled.
Step 6 : Add vanilla extract.
Step 7 : Now give one last mix to your wet ingredients, for a minute, and set it aside. Take all of your dry ingredients and sift them through a sieve.
Step 8 : Mix your dry and wet ingredients together, by slowly adding the wet mix to the dry ingredients, little by little.
Step 9 : Now with a spatula, make sure you have combined everything, and there are no dry pieces of flour left at the bottom of this bowl. Then scoop out the batter and divide it into the three pans. If you're using one pan, then transfer the batter into the cake pan.
Step 10 : Bake the cake at 350 F (convection oven, for a fan oven, use 300 F) for 30-35 minutes, and it's done!
Step 11 : Now the cakes here are done. Let them cool in the cake pan for 2 minutes and then transfer them carefully on a cooling rack. You will see that the cakes also leave the sides of the pan, and hence it becomes easier to take them out. They would be super spongy!! Yayy
After this win, I was happy that at least we'll have something to serve as a cake!
Now once the cakes were cooled down, we started to get on with the decoration. First you will need to level your cakes. So using a leveler or a knife, cut down the slight upper bulge on each cake.
I was extremely sure on making the frosting with whipped cream, since it's super creamy and fluffy and also very light and airy!
So here's what I did
For the first layer of frosting between the cakes, I mixed
1 + 1/2 cup of heavy whipped cream
1/4 cup of sugar
For the second layer of frosting between the cakes, I mixed
1 + 1/2 cup of heavy whipped cream
1/8 cup of sugar
1/8 cup of cocoa powder
For the first layer of outer frosting
1 + 1/2 cup of heavy whipped cream
1/4 cup of sugar + blue color gel drops
For the second layer of outer frosting
1 + 1/2 cup of heavy whipped cream
1/4 cup of sugar + green color gel drops
For the third layer of outer frosting
1 + 1/2 cup of heavy whipped cream
1/4 cup of sugar + pink color gel drops
Then I added some chopped strawberries to both of the inner frostings (1 & 2 above)
Also make a simple sugar syrup (1 cup water + 1 cup sugar, boil them), and spread that syrup on the cake, before you start assembling them. This is will make sure that the cakes remain moist.
Step 12 : Then I made some wave patterns on the outside, using the outside frostings
Step 13 : It was 1 am and the cake was finally done!! You can decorate the cake, just the way you like it. We kept it simple and sweet and chocolaty!
Step 14 : The cake was kept overnight, covered with a lid, in an extremely cold room. You can keep it in the fridge too, but be sure that the cake is in an airtight cake box, so that no other smell in the fridge gets to it.
Get it to room temperature before you serve it. Also once the cake is served, then cut slices of the cake and stick it in the fridge in an airtight container.
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