chocolate layer cake with vanilla cream frosting

I love making birthday cakes for other people, and this was for one of the sweetest people I know. I knew I wanted a classic cake that would look simple and beautiful, and taste incredible. So I turned to Mark Bittman; this seemed like a job for the minimalist. I'm not sure that I'll ever need to try another chocolate birthday cake recipe - this one, to me, is perfect. It's fluffy and moist, tastes richly of chocolate, but is still reminiscent (in all the best ways) of packet mix chocolate cake, and isn't much harder to make. There's just a few tweaks that make this cake really special: using good quality unsweetened chocolate, and whisking the egg whites to snowy peaks before carefully folding them in to the cake batter.

I choose to ice it with a simple vanilla buttercream frosting, also from Bittman, because I like the sneaky element of this cake: on the outside it looks all snowy and pure, but really it's just being coy; inside, it's absolutely chocolate. Of course, you could make the frosting chocolate too, by adding melted and cooled unsweetened chocolate, or beating unsweetened cocoa in with the sugar, but I like the simplicity of the vanilla cream.

I only had time for a few quick photos of the cake at home, before taking it along to the birthday party it was made for. I couldn't resist posting this one of my cat checking out the photo set-up...

chocolate layer cake with vanilla cream frosting

from Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything

8 tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened, plus some for greasing the pans and the paper

2 cups (9 oz) cake or all-purpose (plain) flour, plus some for dusting the pans

3 oz unsweetened chocolate, roughly chopped

1 cup sugar

2 eggs, separated

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/4 cups milk

Preheat the oven to 350ºF/180ºC. Butter the bottom and sides of two 9 inch layer cake pans; cover the bottom with a circle of waxed/parchment/baking paper, butter the paper, and sift flour over the pans; invert to remove excess flour.

Melt the chocolate in a small saucepan or double boiler. If in a saucepan, cook over very low heat, stirring occasionally. If in a double boiler, cook over hot (not boiling) water, stirring occasionally. When the chocolate is just about melted, remove from the heat and continue to stir until mixture is smooth.

Use an electric mixer to cream the butter until smooth, then gradually add the sugar. Beat until light and fluffy, 3 or 4 minutes. Beat in the egg yolks, one at a time, then the vanilla, and finally the chocolate. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, and add them to the chocolate mixture by hand, a little at a time, alternating with the milk. Stir until smooth, no longer.

Beat the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Use your hand or a rubber spatula to fold them gently but thoroughly into the batter. Turn it into the cake pans and bake for about 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of the cakes comes out clean. Cool on a rack for 5 minutes, then invert onto a rack and complete cooling. Don't frost the cakes until they are completely cool. The un-frosted cakes may be stored, covered with plastic wrap, at room temperature for no longer than a day.

vanilla butter cream frosting

adapted from Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything

Makes enough frosting and filling for 1 (9-inch) layer cake, or 24 cupcakes.

8 tbsp (1 stick) salted butter, softened*

4 cups confectioner's/icing sugar

6 tbsp cream or milk (preferably cream), plus a little more if needed

2 tsp vanilla extract

Use a fork or electric mixer to cream the butter. Gradually work in the sugar, alternating with the cream and beating well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. If the frosting is too thick to spread, add a little more cream. If it is too thin, refrigerate: it will thicken as the butter hardens.

* The only difference between Mark Bittman's recipe and what I did with this frosting is that I used salted butter. I always use salted butter for frosting, and I think it improves the flavour about 100%.

swedish apple cake

This is my favourite cake. It's in no way gorgeous: just simple eggs, butter, sugar, flour, topped with chunks of apple, and baked slowly until it's chewy and tender. The Scandinavian tradition of the "visiting cake" that can be thrown together in 10 minutes and ready to eat in 50 is so appealing to me. I wish my cooking was always as effortless. It's welcoming without being overwhelming, and it's this kind of gentle generosity that delights the weary traveller.



The recipe is from the wonderful Dorie Greenspan, whose work I was unfamiliar with until I moved to America. I wish I'd known her books years earlier, but I also wouldn't sacrifice the delight of finding her on a library shelf far from home. This one is from her column on Serious Eats, Baking with Dorie. The recipe calls for a skillet; I use my tarte tatin pan with great results. I recommend buttering the pan and laying baking paper.



Another reason to love this cake: it keeps really well. Wrapped in plastic at room temperature, it transforms from crisp and chewy to a soft cookie of sweet apple. I make it whenever I have friends coming to stay, and for myself to take on buses and planes.



Swedish Apple Cake
from Dorie Greenspan on Serious Eats

3/4 cup all-purpose/plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt (optional)
1 extra large egg or 1 large egg plus 1 large egg yolk
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract (optional)
1 stick (4 oz) unsalted butter, melted and cooled*
1 to 1 1/2 apples (Dorie likes Fujis), peeled, cored, and cut into 1/2-inch thick wedges
apple, quince or jelly preserves, for glazing the cake (optional - I've used fig paste melted in a little hot water, and it was delicious)

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit / 180 Celsius.

*Melt the butter (this is a step I often forget until suddenly the need for melted and cooled butter is upon me!).

Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt, if you're using it.

Working in a mixing bowl with the whisk, beat the egg(s) and sugar together until thick and pale. Stir in the vanilla, if you're using it, and then the melted butter. The mixture will be smooth and shiny. Stir in the dry ingredients and scrape the batter into the prepared pan. Top with the apples, making a spiral pattern. Leave some space between each slice, so the batter can puff up between the wedges - it looks much nicer with the puffs.

Slide the pan into the oven and bake for about 40 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the cake comes out clean. Transfer the cake to a cooling rack.

If you want to glaze the cake, warm a few spoonfuls of jelly/jam and a splash of water in a microwave oven (or a saucepan) until the jelly liquefies. Brush the jelly over the hot cake.

Let the cake cool for at least 15 minutes, or wait until it reaches room temperature, before you cut it into wedges to serve.

white chocolate cupcakes with vienna cream frosting

Impromptu Valentine's Day cupcakes shouldn't be time-consuming or precious. I like this Donna Hay recipe for a white chocolate cake because it's fast and easy: you melt the liquid ingredients together (no softening butter), add them to the dry ingredients, and that's basically all. It tastes sweetly of white chocolate, in a fudgy, almost mud-cake way, but isn't too sweet or overpowering. The quality of white chocolate you use will make a difference because the flavour is strong, but this also isn't a time to use the very best quality.



The truly important thing about these cupcakes is their icing, which adorned every birthday cake of my childhood and comes from a Women's Weekly children's cake cookbook that was owned by all the families I knew. Australian children in the 1980s would go to each other's houses and seek out this cookbook, with its luridly coloured train cake on the cover. With fond familiarity, with the most piercing nostalgia, we'd flip through the book to point out the cakes our mothers had made for us: the piano cake with licorice black keys (my brother dropped this cake; my heart breaks, retroactively, for my mother); the plastic doll a-swim in the green jelly-filled swimming pool cake; the robot cake, somehow so touchingly Cold War; the oven cake, which had a small pan of eggs frying on the hot plate.



No matter the shape of the cake, it was covered in this Vienna Cream Frosting. The name is important because Australians don't use the term frosting - we call it icing. I don't know how "frosting" entered the culinary bible of Australian childhood; I also don't know how, having made its way there, the term didn't instantly pass into orthodoxy. When I started making this icing (really just a buttercream frosting) for myself, it didn't taste like my childhood. Then I realised that was because I was using unsalted butter. Was all Australian butter slighty salted in the 80s?



When I was a child, I told my mother that when I grew up I would make an entire bowlful of this frosting in order to eat it all on its own, without any cake. She told me that when I was grown up, I wouldn't want to. That isn't true.

Easy White Chocolate Cake
by Donna Hay

185g butter, chopped
1 cup milk
1.5 cups caster sugar
150g white chocolate
2 cups plain flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees celsius (320 degrees fahrenheit). Place the butter, milk, sugar and chocolate in a saucepan over low heat and stir until melted and smooth. Place the flour, baking powder, vanilla and eggs in a bowl. Add the chocolate mixture and whisk until smooth. Pour the mixture into a 22cm round cake tin lined with non-stick baking paper*. Bake for 50 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Cool in the tin. Ice the cake when cooled. Serves 8-10.

* Or, divide among approximately 10 large cupcake papers.

Vienna Cream Frosting

125g (4 oz) butter, softened
1.5 cups icing (confectioner's) sugar
2 tbsp milk

Beat butter until as white as possible. Gradually add half the icing sugar, beating constantly. Add milk, then gradually beat in the remaining icing sugar. Mixture should be smooth and easy to spread.

For chocolate Vienna Cream Frosting, add 1 tsp of sifted cocoa. The frosting will turn a lovely soft brown shade and taste even better.