How To Bake, Fill and Frost a Chocolate Layer Cake

Filling and Frosting a Layer Cake

There was a birthday in this house this week, which is why this cake got made whether I felt like filming or not. That turned out to be the useful part. Nothing about this one was staged for the camera. The cake had to be finished and on a plate by a certain hour, and every shortcut I was tempted to take got tested in real time.

If you watched the butter cake video, this is a different animal, and I want to be clear about that up front so the two do not blur together.

Two cakes, two kinds of lift

The butter cake rises mostly on air. You beat that air into the butter and sugar yourself, and if you rush the creaming you can feel the difference in the finished crumb. That is why I spent so long on it in the last video.

This cake uses chemical leaveners. The baking powder is doing the work, which changes how careful you have to be with the batter and how you treat the pans.

Which brings me to something that looks wrong the first time you do it.

Knocking the pans

Once the batter is in the pans, I rap them down on the counter a few times before they go in the oven. Not gently. You are trying to release the big trapped air pockets that would otherwise bake into tunnels through the middle of your layer.

I would not do this to the butter cake. There, the air is the leavening, and knocking it out means knocking out your rise. Here the baking powder is going to generate its own lift in the oven, so losing those big bubbles costs you nothing and buys you a tighter, more even crumb.

Same motion, opposite outcome, depending on what is doing the lifting. This is the sort of thing recipes almost never explain.

The dam

Filling squeezing out the sides of a cake is not a filling problem. It is a structure problem.

Before any filling goes on the first layer, I pipe a ring of buttercream around the outer edge. That ring is the dam. It holds the filling in place while the top layer settles down onto it and while the whole cake sits in the fridge. Without it, the weight of the upper layer pushes the filling out and it bleeds into your frosting, and by then there is no fixing it.

Pipe it just inside the edge, not right at the rim. You want a little room for it to spread when the next layer goes on.

The crumb coat

A crumb coat is a thin first layer of frosting whose only job is to trap loose crumbs against the cake so they do not end up dragged through your finished surface.

It will look bad. It is supposed to look bad. You can see the cake through it in places and that is fine. Get it on, get the cake in the fridge until that layer is firm to the touch, and then frost properly over the top of it. The second coat goes on over frosting instead of over bare crumb, and that is the whole trick.

Skipping this is the single most common reason a home cake looks homemade in the way nobody wants.

Color, and why you should do it early

I use gel paste color, not the little liquid bottles from the grocery store baking aisle. The liquids are mostly water, so to get any real color into buttercream you end up adding enough liquid to loosen the whole batch. Gel gets you there with a fraction of the volume.

Here is the part I wish somebody had told me years ago: the color keeps developing after you mix it. What looks like a soft pink when you put the bowl down will be noticeably deeper an hour later. If you tint to the shade you want right now, you will overshoot.

So color your frosting ahead if your schedule allows it. Mix it lighter than your target, walk away, and come back and look. If you have to do it same day, at least give it thirty minutes before you decide it needs more.

Flavoring frosting without wrecking it

For the strawberry, I use freeze dried strawberries ground to a powder rather than jam or fresh fruit or an extract.

Fresh fruit brings water, and water in buttercream gives you a soupy, curdled mess. Freeze dried berries bring the flavor with none of the moisture, and they tint the frosting a little on their own, which means you need less color from a bottle. The flavor is also more honest than most strawberry extracts, which tend to taste like candy.

Frosting that has been in the fridge

If your buttercream has been chilled, do not put it straight back on the mixer. It will look broken and you will think you ruined it.

Let it sit out on the counter about 45 minutes first. Then whip it. It comes back together smooth and it will be right.

THE PRINTABLES. THERE ARE 2 PRINTABLES FOR THIS VIDEO:

CAKE RECIPE [PRINTABLE LINK]

Extra Frosting Details Printable - PRINTABLE LINK

Everything above is on the handout, along with [describe what else is on it], so you are not scrolling on a phone with frosting on your hands.

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