Wedding Cake Baking - Part 3: Chocolate Cake

And now to the actual cake. Two of the cake tiers were chocolate cake and I used the same recipe for both. I adapted the chocolate fudge grooms cake recipe available on the Wilton website in order to make enough to fill the two 12" cake pans. And then used the recipe as written for the two 8" cake pans.

Now I have a basic chocolate cake recipe that I typically use for all my chocolate cake needs but when I attempted to upsize it to fill a 12" pan it turned out dry around the edges by the time the middle baked. Which led to to searching out the Wilton recipe.


First I combined the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and whisked it together. This aerates the flour and combines the ingredients, I tend to do this rather than sifting all the flour.


In a stand mixer, I creamed the butter and sugar together. Then added eggs, vanilla and then alternated adding the milk and the flour mixture, till I had a typical looking cake batter.


Now to the chocolate. The recipe calls for unsweetened chocolate, but generally the baking chocolate that you get at the grocery store is not of the highest quality. So I buy dark chocolate in bulk from Whole Foods since they are the most reasonably priced place to buy chocolate by the pound. If you don't have a Whole Foods store nearby you could check other specialty stores or a cake supply store. I chop the chocolate and then melt in the microwave in short bursts of 15 seconds, stirring in between.


Then add the melted chocolate to the cake batter and mix for a couple minutes until the chocolate is fully incorporated. I split the batter into the two pans; I poured the batter into the pans till they looked even and then weighed each of the pans to make sure they contained equal amounts of batter. (This is helpful as you can make sure your baked layers are even for splitting.)

I baked the layers at 325 degrees for about 50 minutes and then let them cool. Once cool, I split each layer in half and poured a little simple syrup on them to keep them moist.

And now its time to frost. I filled this tier with peanut-butter buttercream (recipe to follow in another blog post) and stacked.

And filled and stacked...
And once I had completed all 4 layers, I chilled the cake and crumb coated (iced) the whole tier with vanilla buttecream. While practicing this cake I attempted to use the peanut butter icing for the crumb coat and icing, but you could see the pale tan icing underneath the white fondant.

I then covered the cake with fondant and painted the fondant with a pearl colored luster dust. Sorry for the lack of pictures, I got a little rushed and forgot to take pictures of that step.