Chocolate Birthday Cake with Icing

Moist Chocolate Cake with a Simple Decoration

This is the perfect chocolate birthday cake. It’s soft, it’s moist, and is filled and topped with a delicious mix of chocolate ganache and chocolate buttercream icing. And even better, it’s quick and easy to make. It would be hard to find a better choice than this chocolate birthday cake with icing.

Read on for step-by-step instructions on how to make this super-tasty and moist chocolate cake and then give it a classy finish with a with simple decoration. This is a two-layered naked cake (the sides are bare), but it’s bursting with an irresistible chocolatey flavour. The chocolate flavour comes from cocoa powder, chocolate ganache, and chocolate buttercream. Besides, the recipe includes instant coffee for further enhancing the chocolate flavour.

Another thing that makes this one an easy chocolate birthday cake with icing to make, is that you need not worry about having to pipe ‘Happy Birthday’ on the top. Here we’re using a homemade cake topper with a birthday message scrawled across it. You could easily make one using just an old birthday card, some glue, and a toothpick. What could be easier than that?

Here’s how you could make buttercream icing at home. And if you’re looking for a full tutorial on making chocolate ganache, here it is.

Ingredients

Cake:

1¼ cup maida (all-purpose flour)

6 tbsp cocoa powder

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

2 eggs

6 tbsp oil (¼ cup + 2 tbsp)

¾ cup sugar (coarsely ground)

½ cup milk (room temperature)

1 tsp white vinegar

½ cup boiling hot water

1 tsp instant coffee

½ tsp vanilla extract

For the sugar syrup:

¼ cup water

2 tbsp powdered sugar

For the icing:

¾ cup chocolate ganache (spreading consistency)

1½ tbsp chocolate ganache (for chocolate buttercream)

¾ cup white buttercream (for chocolate buttercream)

¼ cup white buttercream

Procedure:

1. Prepare a 7″ round baking pan by oiling and lining it with parchment paper. Apply a little oil over the top of the parchment paper at the bottom as well.
2. Next, prepare some buttermilk by adding the vinegar to the milk, stirring it, and setting it aside for a few minutes.
3. Mix or whisk the maida, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together and then sift the mix.
4. Whisk the eggs and the sugar for a few minutes. Add in the vanilla extract and whisk everything for a minute or so.
5. Slowly stir in the oil. Then whisk the mix well.
6. Next, add the buttermilk and whisk everything again.
7. Add the boiling hot water to the instant coffee granules. Give the coffee a stir, and then mix it into the other wet ingredients.
8. It’s now time to add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Mix in the dry ingredients in three portions, mixing everything well after each addition only till the wet and dry ingredients just combine. Don’t over-mix the batter. It will be a thin kind of batter, thinner than a ribbon consistency batter.
9. Pour the batter into the prepared baking pan. Tap the pan 4 or 5 times. Doing this will help release most of the trapped air bubbles in the batter and ensure your cake won’t peak into a high dome.
10. Bake the cake in your preheated oven at 170 C (340 F) for around 30 minutes or till a skewer inserted into it comes out clean.
11. Let the cake cool in the pan for around 15 minutes, then invert it on a wire rack. Let it cool completely before frosting it. You could cool it for a few hours or overnight on your counter top. If you want to keep it in the fridge overnight, then wrap it in cling film first.
12. After the cake has cooled completely, level the top by slicing off the dome of the cake. This being a moist and tasty cake, this piece you cut off could be enjoyed as it is.
13. Then slice the cake horizontally into two layers.
14. Prepare the sugar syrup by dissolving the 2 tbsp of powdered sugar in 4 tbsp (1/4 cup) of water. Soak each cake half with a few teaspoons of the sugar syrup. Being soft and moist, this cake won’t need more than half of the soaking syrup.
15. Have the three different frostings ready in piping bags. Prepare chocolate buttercream icing by mixing 1 and 1/2 tbsp of chocolate ganache with around 3/4 cup of plain buttercream.
16. Apply around a tsp of buttercream or ganache over the centre of a cake-board and then set the upper half of the cake on it with the top cut surface down. That is, the top will now be the bottom of the cake.
17. Add a filling between the layers (I’m adding a mix of chocolate buttercream and chocolate ganache as a filling) and then upturn the other layer of cake over the first one with the bottom of the cake forming the top surface. You could ice the top with any design of your own. I’m using a mix of chocolate buttercream, chocolate ganache and buttercream to frost the top of the cake. I have a preference for ‘naked’ cakes, and so I’ve kept the sides bare. But you could cover the sides of the cake too with frosting if you want.
18. Finally, insert a Happy Birthday cake topper into the cake. (I’ve used a homemade one.)

The cake will stay good outside the fridge for 2 – 3 days. After that, you could move it to your fridge.

Enjoy!