Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe with Fluffy Chocolate Buttercream Frosting (2024)

FAQs

What kind of frosting goes best with chocolate cake? ›

If there's one frosting more addicting than buttercream, it's Nutella. Nutella frosting is a rich and luscious treat that will turn your chocolate cake into a masterpiece. Slightly nutty and incredibly sweet, Nutella compliments the rich flavor of chocolate in every way possible.

Using oil in cakes will produce a crumb that is more moist than if using butter because vegetable oil is a liquid at room temperature rather than a solid at room temperature like butter. The recipe also uses buttermilk which helps keep the cake moist too. What kind of frosting goes well with chocolate cake?

If you were to use exclusively oil, the cake would turn out much denser than you may have intended. If you're unsure, it's safest to use a 50/50 combination of butter and oil instead of replacing the butter completely.

Most cakes will call for a leavening agent like baking powder or baking soda. These create the bubbles you need for the cake to rise. If the flour you use is self-raising, it already has a leavening agent in it. Make sure your butter is room temperature, and beat the butter and sugar together until properly creamed.

If you're planning to serve your frosted cake or treat within 3 days of making it, you can store it, covered, at room temperature. Otherwise, decorated treats are best kept in the fridge.

Buttercream Frosting

You can flavor yours with vanilla extract, vanilla beans, citrus zest, or even espresso.

Buttercream icing is a versatile frosting that can be paired with a variety of cake flavors. It is a classic choice for vanilla, chocolate, and yellow cakes, but it can also be used to complement other flavors like red velvet, carrot cake, and spice cake.

Why does oil give cake superior texture? Butter is 18% water, so when the batter is baked, some of its liquid evaporates. Replacing the water from the butter with oil means there's more fat left in the cakes to ensure tenderness.

Baking tip #2: adding milk to your box cake mix in place of water adds a dense texture to your dessert leaving it moist and flavorful like a homemade cake. Or, if you prefer, you can add buttermilk, giving your cake a tangy flavor to balance out the sweetness.

Should you use milk instead of water in cake mix? ›

Most box cake recipes will tell you to add water to the mix. Instead, try adding milk using the same proportions. This will make the cake richer and creamier because it ups the fat content. You can even use buttermilk here for a pleasant tang.

Canola oil is, without doubt, one of the best types of oil for baking. It's preferred in many recipes since it has the most neutral flavor compared to other types of oil. It also tends to be lighter in flavour, so it will not negatively affect the baked product's flavor and texture.

With cakes, taste is the obvious difference when butter is used instead of shortening. Because making cake batter calls for creaming butter and sugar (check out How to Cream Butter and Sugar for more on that), cakes made with butter will be as light and tender as those made with shortening.

Most cake mixes call for oil, but butter will bring in amazing flavor. To substitute butter for oil in baking just melt the butter, measure it, let it cool, and add it as you would the oil. Compared to oil, butter will create a cake with a firmer, cakeier texture.

Cakes made with cake flour tend to be softer and fluffier than those made with all-purpose flour. This is because cake flour has corn starch mixed in it. Corn starch is known to make the cake crumb softer, giving structure to cakes and other baked goods while remaining soft.

Adding extra wet ingredients like yoghurt or sour cream can really help your cake retain moisture, especially if you're cooking with chocolate which is notorious for drying out a bake.