It’s unavoidable. Valentine’s Day = Chocolate. I set out to find a luxurious, rich chocolate cake that would satisfy all of my sweet teeth. (I have more than one, clearly.) This dark chocolate cake that uses a sweet red wine to kick up the flavor ticks ALL the boxes. The raspberry buttercream between the layers adds a festive pink color and the tart berries are a perfect complement to all of that chocolate. Maybe I ate raspberry buttercream by the spoonful after I was done, maybe I didn’t. Don’t judge me!
No one aspect of this bake is particularly difficult. I’ve made many a chocolate cake. I’ve made buttercream. I’ve made ganache. What makes this daunting is that I’ve never assembled, frosted, and decorated a layer cake. I am a cupcake girl out of sheer cowardice. However, my Secret Santa gifted me a lovely Wilton cake turntable for Christmas this year, and it was time to use it. When you break it down step-by-step, I promise it isn’t so scary.
There are two twists on what I consider to be the “normal” chocolate cake recipe (compliments of Life Love and Sugar). The first is buttermilk. I am a firm believer that buttermilk is the golden ingredient that makes every recipe better. None of my other chocolate cake recipes include buttermilk and I seriously didn’t know what I was missing. The second is that this recipe uses a cup of sweet red wine. The resulting cake didn’t have a strong wine flavor, but the wine I used was pretty light. A fuller bodied wine may shine through the chocolate a bit better. I think this recipe would also be solid using a cup of black coffee in place of the wine. Future experiments are in the works, because this recipe as a whole pretty much rocks. It’s super moist, but has enough structure to hold the layers. I’m a fan.
Because all of the elements are really easy, all of the tricks and tips I have for this cake are about little things you can do that may take extra time but will save you effort in the long run. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: parchment is your friend. I cut three 8″ rounds of parchment, brushed butter in the bottom and sides of the cake tins, laid the parchment rounds inside, and lightly brushed the parchment with another light layer of butter.
If you have a kitchen scale, take a minute before you start mixing to weigh your mixing bowl. That way, you can weigh it again after, do some simple math (ew, I know), and make sure you divide the batter into three equal layers in your cake tins. The cake itself is super simple. Add wet ingredients into dry ingredients. Slowly add the wine last. Quick note: this batter is pretty thin. I was concerned at first, but it baked beautifully. Before you ask–yes, this cake bakes at 300F and takes a relatively long bake time compared to other cake recipes. Neither is a mistake. I baked all three layers in my tiny oven and I had plenty of space. I rotated them partway through to make sure they baked evenly. They were perfectly done at 35 minutes.
After cooling for about 10 minutes, you can remove them from the cake tins. Remember that extra time spent parchmenting and greasing? You get that time back right here. You also get cakes that don’t stick when you turn them out and therefore are perfectly round when you go to stack and frost later. Boom!
It took me some time to get up the nerve to level off the cakes. In theory, I know how it’s done. In practice, I am the world’s worst judge of something being level. I am liable to shave these cakes down to nothing in my attempt to get them perfect. I didn’t allow myself the permission to be that OCD about perfectly level cakes. For one thing, you can make it up with buttercream. For another… Who cares? You are not a cake baking professional, Nina. This is your first time doing this. Shut up and just cut the dome off. {{eye roll}} It’s a good thing I had an open bottle of wine.
I didn’t take many photos of making the buttercream. I was also shouting instructions to my husband on how to make a particular dish for dinner, so you’ll have to forgive the lack of photos of “stuff in my mixer” for this post. That recipe is also pretty straightforward. Just be mindful of the powdered sugarsplosion that can happen if you turn the mixer on with too much loose sugar in it. Of course, just like in the post a few weeks ago for my Raspberry Cheesecake Brownie Bars, the raspberry buttercream needed me to squash raspberry puree through a mesh sieve to get the seeds out. Back then, I said I’d research a faster and more efficient way to do it. Turns out, that’s the only way. This time I blended fresh raspberries in a magic bullet to get that nice tart bite from the berries. Have I mentioned yet how much I loved this buttercream?
The second scary part of this project: stacking and icing cakes. I mentioned before that I got a cake turn-table from my Secret Santa this year. That thing is amazing. I highly recommend investing in one (basic ones are not expensive) if you’re going to do any cake decorating. Yes, of course you can do this without it, but it’s a time saver for sure. Cake boards are another handy thing to have around the house before cake decorating. For the love, put the cakes directly on the cake board and then on the turn table. I didn’t. We’ll get to why that was a mistake in a minute.
With three layers of cake, there were two layers of buttercream filling. I also made a last-minute decision that I really wanted that bright berry burst of both color and flavor in this cake, so I added in some fresh raspberries in each layer to be hidden jewels of raspberry goodness.
I added a generous layer of buttercream, and spread it evenly with my offset spatula.
I cut the raspberries in half, blotted to remove excess moisture, and pressed them into the buttercream.
I added a bit more buttercream to fill in the gaps before adding the next layer.
I did this for both layers. I left the extra buttercream come out of the sides a bit, because I was going to use the raspberry buttercream as the crumb coat as well.
Let’s talk about crumb coats. I had no idea what a crumb coat was before this, but wow. I’d never have thought of this on my own. Now I can’t imagine not doing it. If there are extra crumbs or pieces that have broken off (I had one little area on the top layer), this is the opportunity to solve those issues so you can still have a perfectly smooth frosting without little flecks of chocolate cake messing up your beautiful surface. Basically, you put on just enough frosting to cover everything lightly, then scrape off any excess. You’ll end up with something that looks like this:
If you chill that for a half hour, the butter in your icing firms up and you end up with a smooth and crumb free surface to apply the frosting layer you’ll end up seeing. Here’s another helpful tip: if you’re planning on using the filling buttercream to decorate after you’ve added your main buttercream, don’t refrigerate it. Buttercream gets hard fast in the fridge, which is why this crumb coat thing works, and why you’ll spend a lot of time trying to get it warmed back up enough to pipe later. Yes, I’m speaking from personal experience while making this…
Silly me didn’t take any photos while I was doing the frosting. I was concentrating pretty hard, making mistakes, and using the limited tools I had to try to replicate the steps in the video from the original blog post. Needless to say, I will soon be purchasing the requisite tools to apply and smooth buttercream for my next layer cake! What good is having a baking blog if you don’t spend all your money buying new gadgets, amiright?
The frosting job was not 100% smooth. I’ll be honest, I had spent enough time trying at this point, and I was pretty sure this would be good enough.
Finally, it was time to prepare the chocolate ganache. There is nothing better in this world than chocolate ganache done right. There is also nothing more disappointing than chocolate ganache gone wrong. We’ll call what happened tonight a chocolate ganache hail mary, because it started to go a little wrong, but I repurposed it into something that I was pretty proud of in the end.
Ganache is as easy as pouring warmed (but not boiling) heavy cream into chopped chocolate or chocolate chips, allowed to let sit until the chocolate melts, then whisked together until smooth. As easy as it can be, ganache can get grainy or seize up altogether and get clumpy. It can be too runny, so it will never firm. A good ganache will usually be nice and glossy with a consistency that will pour and spread easily, but won’t flow everywhere and make a giant mess.
Tonight’s ganache didn’t melt all the way, so it stayed a little too hard to pour and get some attractive drips down the side, which was the original vision. I tried to save it by warming a bit more cream and adding it a bit at a time. That did help to thin it, but it never quite got to pour-and-drip consistency. I tried anyway…gently pushing the ganache to the sides of the cake, where it just made an unattractive lip around the edge without dripping. I tried to help it along its way. That made it worse. In the end, I decided to make it into a decorative element. I left the top smooth and spread the ganache down the sides in rough strokes of the spatula. Don’t tell anyone how that wasn’t the plan along! I trust you to keep my secret, whole of the internet!
The final hurdle to cross before putting the final touches on the decorations was to transfer the cake to the cake board, because stupid me didn’t think to just decorate the cake on the cake board on top of the turntable. Here’s what I should have done: After putting down your first layer of cake on the board, but before adding the first layer of frosting, cut five thin strips of wax paper and slide them underneath the cake covering any exposed cake board. Frost to your heart’s content. Before adding the bottom border of the cake, slide the wax paper out from under the cake along with any mess you have made, resulting in a perfectly clean cake board and a complete lack of stress and anxiety you’d have if you needed to lift the cake using your offset spatula enough to get a hand underneath the cake to move it, risking the possibility of all the work you’ve done over the last couple of hours crashing to the floor in one huge chocolate and raspberry heap.
Please imagine the face I am making as I reminisce rather unfondly of the stakes that moment had for me. Trust me, you don’t want to have to do it that way. The wax paper trick is much easier. Why five strips of wax paper? I don’t know. I made that up. I only know that if you use four in a square pattern, you won’t get good enough coverage unless you have the wax paper too far underneath the cake, making it more difficult to cleanly slide out later. Five in a star pattern would seem to solve that problem. Maybe six would be better. Try seven if you want to get wild. I just know four or less won’t do much good. I may not have ever done a layer cake before, but I’ve iced a single layer round cake. Four doesn’t work.
From this point on, you can just get creative with decorations. I used some fresh raspberries (because I like for people to have a hint as to what may be in the filling) and the leftover raspberry buttercream to add some color around the top. I will spare you my piping skills sob stories this time and simply say that I could use a day of practice and some new decorating tips (ahem, Secret Valentine! Nudge, nudge!). However, just because you don’t have mad decorator skills doesn’t mean your cakes can’t look attractive. I kept mine simple: lower border to hide the seam between cake and cake board and an upper border for a little color. The happy ganache snafu added some texture to the sides, and I can proudly say that I was pretty pleased with the result!
Ultimately, it’s what’s inside that counts. I took the cake in to work, and it was absolutely devoured. I swear, this chocolate cake recipe is going to pop up in a lot of places in the future, so stay tuned!
Red Wine Chocolate Cake
A super moist chocolate cake with just a hint of red wine flavor filled with raspberry buttercream, fresh raspberries, a chocolate buttercream frosting and a chocolate ganache. Recipe compliments of lifeloveandsugar.com
Ingredients
- For the Cake:
- 2 cups (260 g) All Purpose Flour
- 2 cups (414g) Sugar
- 3/4 cup (85g) Hershey's Special Dark Cocoa powder
- 2 tsp Baking Soda
- 1 tsp Salt
- 1 cup Buttermilk
- 1 cup Vegetable Oil
- 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
- 1 cup Sweet Red Wine (could substitute with water or coffee)
- For the Raspberry Buttercream:
- 6 oz Fresh Raspberries (pureed and strained into 5-6 Tbsp)
- 3/4 cup Butter, room temperature
- 3/4 cup Shortening*
- 6 cups (690g) Powdered Sugar
- For the Chocolate Buttercream:
- 3/4 cup Butter, room temperature
- 1/2 cup Shortening*
- 5 cups (575g) Powdered Sugar
- 1/2 cup (57g) Hershey's Special Dark Cocoa powder
- 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
- 5-6 Tbsp Milk or Water
- For the Chocolate Ganache:
- 6 oz Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
- 1/2 cup Heavy Whipping Cream
- Extra Raspberries for filling and/or decorating
- *Butter can be substituted for shortening if desired (this particular cake was all butter, baby!)
Directions
- Step 1 Preheat oven to 300F
- Step 2 Grease bottom and sides of three 8″ cake pans with butter. Add parchment circles in the bottom. Lightly grease parchment
- Step 3 Add dry ingredients to a large mixing bowl and whisk to combine
- Step 4 Add the rest of the ingredients except wine and mix well
- Step 5 Slowly add wine to batter as it mixes
- Step 6 Divide batter evenly among three cake pans. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean
- Step 7 Remove cakes from oven and allow to cool in pans for 10 minutes. Remove from pans and allow to completely cool on wire racks
- Step 8 To make raspberry buttercream, beat the butter (and shortening, if using) until smooth. Add half of the powdered sugar and beat until smooth. Add 3-4 Tbsp of strained raspberry puree and beat until smooth. Add the rest of the sugar and beat until smooth. Add additional raspberry puree until the desired flavor and consistency is reached. Add red food coloring if a stronger color is desired
- Step 9 To make chocolate buttercream: beat butter (and shortening, if using) until smooth. Add cocoa powder and half the powdered sugar and beat until smooth. Add vanilla extract and 3-4 Tbsp of milk or water and beat until smooth. Add remaining powdered sugar and beat until smooth. Add additional milk or water until desired consistency is reached
- Step 10 When cakes are completely cool, remove the tops of the cakes with a sharp serrated knife so they are flat. Set scraps aside for mid-frosting snacks!
- Step 11 Place the first layer on the cake board or cake stand. Top with a 1/2 cup or so of raspberry buttercream. Press fresh raspberries, if using, into the buttercream. Leave clear space around the outside edge. Top with 1/2 cup buttercream and spread into an even layer.
- Step 12 Top with second layer and repeat. Top with final layer.
- Step 13 Frost the outside with a thin layer of buttercream (either raspberry or chocolate), remove excess, and chill to set, about 30 minutes
- Step 14 Frost the outside of the cake with chocolate buttercream
- Step 15 To make chocolate ganache: Heat cream on stovetop until almost boiling. Pour hot cream over chocolate chips and allow to sit for 2-3 minutes. Whisk until smooth
- Step 16 Allow ganache a few minutes to firm into a consistency that is pourable, but not too runny
- Step 17 Drizzle ganache around the top edge of cake and allow to run down the sides. Pour remaining ganache onto the top of the cake. Allow ganache to firm before adding final decorations
- Step 18 Use leftover frosting, fresh berries, and/or sprinkles however you like to complete your cake!
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