For a student’s birthday, I made devil’s food cake with milk chocolate or white chocolate frosting. Recipe was taken from Stella Parks’ BraveTart, but can also be found here. It has been awhile since I made a layered cake and this was a good way to get a little bit more practice in that area.

Probably a bit ironic to bring the devil’s cake to church but ehh.

Making the Devil’s Food Cake

What caught my eye was that this recipe could be done in one bowl. I saw good reviews for how simple it came together, which is why I decided to give it a try. The only tweak I’ve made to that recipe was to change the chocolate used from dark chocolate to semi-sweet chocolate, on account of the student having a sweeter tooth and a distaste for dark chocolate. Technically, the semi-sweet chocolate was still a category of dark chocolate but still had less cacao content than what I would usually prefer (56% vs 72%). This subsequently provoked a debate in the merits of dark vs milk chocolate that I will not get into at this time.

Anyway, since I only wanted to make a small cake, I halved the recipe and divided the batter into two 6 x 3 pans. The ending batter was a little lumpy but I also didn’t want to risk over-whisking it.

After baking it close to 30 minutes, I took the two cakes, now fully baked out of the oven. Curiously, I noticed that there was an interesting texture mound in the center of both cakes, which I think might’ve been due to the last drips of batter being added. I didn’t mind too much since I knew that I was going to be slicing off those tops anyway.

After letting both cakes cool to room T, I ran a knife through the edges of the pans and wrapped both cakes tightly in saran warp to chill overnight.

Milk Chocolate and White Chocolate Frosting

Is there such thing as too much chocolate? The original recipe called for the cake to be frosting with milk chocolate frosting. I was a little apprehensive on the chocolate overload and decided that the two cakes I would make would have two kinds of frosting to make a comparison between the two.

1. Milk Chocolate Frosting
2. White Chocolate Frosting

Both recipes were really simple, much more simple to put together than a buttercream frosting. It was actually just making ganache + whipping it in a stand mixer. It was a matter of adding some heated cream to chopped up chocolate, whisking until smooth, and chilling it for a couple hours before whipping it to a frosting-like consistency by stand mixer. I did notice that the whipped white chocolate seemed softer/more liquid-y than the milk chocolate frosting.

For the milk chocolate, I used Hershey’s milk chocolate while I used Ghirardelli’s white chocolate bars for the other frosting. In the case for white chocolate, I added 1 tbsp of vanilla extract, but I think I could have added closer to 1.5 tbsp since the ending product had only faint notes of vanilla.

Assembling the Cakes

In preparation to assemble cakes, I trimmed the tops and cut the cakes in half with a serrated knife. It was a little tricky to cut through the cakes in half. I was trying my hardest to cut a straight line across the cake, hoping very hard that I would not cut crookedly and make uneven layers (which had happened with a previous cake I cut across). The first cake, I tried to saw back-and-forth with a serrated knife but ended up taking a bit off the top in terms of crumbs. It was also very hard to hold onto the cake while sawing as well too. For the second cake, I pushed and rotated the serrated knife around the cake, which I feel like still wasn’t quite the right way of doing things but seemed to yield better results than just sawing through.

I first stacked and crumb-coated the cakes, starting with the milk chocolate frosting, followed by the white chocolate frosting (after whipping both to a frosting consistency), and let them both chill and harden in the fridge for the next 45 minutes. I noticed it was easier to crumb coat with a bench scraper, more than an off-set spatula. This also gave me the excuse to use the 8in cardboard rounds and the turntable that I had sitting in my baking supply box for the past year.

Because these were small cakes, putting the final layers of frosting wasn’t too much of a big deal. I could see why the crumb coat would help. The layers did not slide at all and I was able to frost both cakes without issue. The only issue was that the frosting, especially for the white chocolate, seemed to melt or grow soft at room temp.

How to decorate the cakes was also another hurdle I had to cross. I thought about piping something but didn’t want to deal with it this time around. After fussing it over a bit and looking through google images for some inspo, I decided on the good old tried-and-true three berry simple decoration for one cake and an oreo cookie crumb ring topping for the other.

After finishing both cakes, I refrigerated both cakes uncovered overnight to let the frosting harden into place. Because I was also worried about travel and the fact that these cakes would be traveling in 88-90F weather, I ended up freezing both cakes for 1.5 hours and jerryrigging a cake carrier with some ice packs to keep it cool, which, though ghetto, seems to have done the trick.

Overall

The cakes turned out quite nicely. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the cross section of the chocolate cake before giving it to the student but both were solid cakes. For the chocolate lovers, the milk chocolate frosting was not overkill but ended up providing a nice sweet mellow taste in comparison to the darker taste of the cake, which luckily did not turn out super sweet either. I like the frosting:cake ratio, which was not too much but not too little either.

I brought my black and white cake to my other youth group, where it was promptly and quietly devoured in thirty minutes. That cake also tasted pretty good but I wish I added more vanilla extract to the frosting since the white chocolate made the frosting taste creamy with some afternotes of cacao butter but could have tasted much better with more vanilla. I’m also glad that the white chocolate frosting did not melt and lasted for the next few hours in transit to make it to the church.

Overall, as someone who doesn’t care too much for cakes, I enjoyed both cakes and it’s definitely a solid cake to make/have. I might not like receiving cake but I would not mind making this for someone else.