Sasha's Kitchen: Three Tiered Chocolate Cake with Peanut Butter Buttercream

Recently, my husband and I hosted a lovely dinner party for some old college friends. A good time was had by all and we served a four course menu that was matched with beer and wine pairings that one of your friends brought to share with the meal. We have a nice backyard here in Brooklyn, so we first had cheese and crackers with champagne outside since it was a lovely summer night.  Second course brought us inside for chinese style duck dumplings, followed by zucchini-corn fritters with yogurt sauce.  The third course was my homemade spinach ravioli with a three cheese filling (show here is a plain, non spinach batch). And, finally, its cake time.  I did another garden party themed cake, decorated with pretty pink flowers that I piped on with vanilla buttercream that I dyed pink for the flowers and yellow for the centers. I used the special wilton flower tip for making the petals for each of the pink flowers in the cake.  This time, I went with the cookbook from Alice's Tea Cup by Haley & Lauren Fox for the chocolate cake recipe, and also followed their recipe for peanut butter buttercream, which I used to frost the outside of the cake and between the layers.  I found using a rotating cake turner to be very useful for both frosting and decorating the cake. I decorated using a basic vanilla buttercream. 

Chocolate Cake - (makes three 8'' layers) - recipe from the Alice's Tea Cup Cookbook

2 cups of sugar
1 3/4 cups of all purpose flour
3/4 cups unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp kosher salt
1/4 cup sour cream
2 eggs
1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup hot brewed coffee

To prepare the cake, preheat the oven to 350. You will need three eight inch cake pans.  Prepare the three eight inch cake pans and combine the fry ingredients together in a bowl (flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt). In the basin of your stand mixer, on medium speed, beat the sour cream and eggs (one at a time), milk, oil and vanilla, and add in the dry ingredients, mixing for two minutes. Scape down the bowl and drizzle in the coffee and blend until smooth. It will be a very liquidy mixture, which is fine and appropriate.

Divide the cake batter evenly among the cake pans and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Allow the cakes to cool in the pans before gently removing from the pans and allowing to cool on a wire rack until room temperature.  If necessary, trim the tops of the cake to level them, but I found that this recipe did not require any leveling. Frost between layers and on the top and sides of the cake with the buttercream. To make the buttercream, beat the ingredients until smooth.

Peanut Butter Buttercream

2 sticks unsalted butter at room temperature

1 1/4 cups cream cheese, at room temperature

1 cup peanut butter

5 cups confectioner's sugar

1 T milk