Chocolate Cake with Brown Butter Frosting

This is a chocolate cake everyone can enjoy, the crumb is tender and the flavor chocolate-y without being overly rich. What puts this cake over the top is the brown butter frosting, which brings a punch of rich warmth and toasted nut flavor that pairs flawlessly with the delicate chocolate cake.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Little Flower Baking cookbook. When the recipes turn out, they are really good...... but quite a few of the recipes are flawed and require some tinkering to work. This chocolate cake from Little Flower Baking is yet another example of an insufficiently tested recipe making its way into a cookbook.

Fortunately, the solution was pretty obvious after suffering through the first iteration. The weights and volumes given did not add up to the same ratios, and I opted to use the “volumes”, purely based on past experiences with this cookbook. Whatever scaling they did from the bakery, this recipe needed to have been cut in half one more time.

The batter spewed over the sides of the mixer, was stiff and phenomenally difficult to combine. Matters weren’t helped by trying to combine coffee with cold sour cream (room temperature was not specified), which was a messy and virtually impossible task. The recipe instructs the reader to bake the cake in 2 9” pans, but I had enough batter to fill 4 9” pans (since I didn’t have 4 9” pans, I made 2 8” cakes and 2 9” cakes the first time around). With the high amount of leavening in the batter, these cakes rise right up to the very top of the pans.

After the debacle of making the cake, it was time to make the brown butter frosting. This frosting, much like the cake, was much more complicated to make and use than anticipated.

While the cake recipe hadn’t been correctly scaled down and yielded too much batter, the frosting recipe had been scaled down too far and yielded half the amount of frosting needed. As with caramel-based frostings, this brown butter frosting also stiffens up almost immediately after it’s been made, so you need to make it right before frosting the cake. As originally written, you must rewhip the unused portion of the frosting several times as you work to finish the frosting coating because it continues stiffening up over time. This causes more trouble than you might expect, since the stiffening frosting crumbles as you work with it, which means you really have no hope of crumb coating or putting a decorative pattern on the final cake; what you hastily slap on is what you have to work with.

Since I didn’t have enough frosting for my cakes, I used about ½ cup of salted caramel from Cookie Love to sandwich the split layers of my cake together (I split each 9-inch cake in two).

Despite my trials in making this chocolate cake with brown butter frosting, the cake itself was a huge hit. Tons of people wanted to know what the miracle ingredient was in the frosting and virtual strangers asked from the recipe.

That was yearssssss ago, and it took me a while to come back around to making this, but finally, I’ve settled on the following recipe after a couple attempts to nail down what this cake should be. The cake batter itself was a pretty simple fix (specifying temperatures for ingredients). The brown butter frosting needed clarifying instructions, accurate timing, and a bit more cream to facilitate decorating. I hope you'll love this chocolate cake with brown butter frosting as much as I do.

Adapted from Little Flower Baking

Chocolate Cake with Brown Butter Frosting

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Course: Dessert

Cuisine: American

Prep Time: 50 minutes minutes

Cook Time: 1 hour hour 5 minutes minutes

Cooling and frosting time: 5 hours hours

Total Time: 6 hours hours 55 minutes minutes

Servings: 12

Ingredients

Chocolate Cake

• 8 ounces (2 sticks; 226 grams) unsalted butter softened
• 14 ounces (2 cups; 400 grams) white sugar
• 2 large eggs at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 teaspoon almond extract
• 1 ¼ cups (280 grams) brewed coffee room temperature
• 1 cup (250 grams) sour cream full-fat and at room-temperature
• 2 ½ cups, spooned (342 grams) all-purpose flour unbleached
• 1 cup (114 grams) Dutch-processed cocoa powder
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon (3 ½ g) Diamond Crystal kosher salt if using table salt, use about half as much by volume or the same weight

Brown Butter Frosting

• 16 ounces (4 sticks, 452 grams) unsalted butter
• 6 ⅔ cup (832 grams) powdered sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• ½ vanilla bean seeds scraped (or another 2 teaspoons vanilla extract)
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 3 tablespoons whole milk
• ½ cup heavy cream

Instructions

Brown Butter (for frosting)

• In a 4-6 quart stainless steel saucier (or any medium/large-sized high-sided saucepan), completely melt the butter over medium-low heat. Increase to medium and simmer, stirring with a heat-resistant spatula while the butter hisses and pops. Continue cooking and stirring, scraping up any brown bits that form along the bottom of the pan -- it is important to actively scrape up the milk solids that brown so none of them burn-- until the butter is golden-yellow and perfectly silent. This takes much longer than most recipes state, especially with this much butter; it will likely take at least 20 minutes. Pour into a heat-safe measuring cup, along with all the toasty brown bits, and set aside until ready to make the frosting, or cover and refrigerate up to 1 week; gently melt (until room temperature) before using.

Chocolate Cake

• Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and preheat to 350°F (180°C). Lightly grease two 9-inch anodized aluminum cake pans and line with parchment. If you don’t have two 9-inch pans, it’s okay to bake the cakes in 8-inch pans instead.
• Add the softened butter and granulated sugar to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix on low to moisten, then increase to medium and beat until thick and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Use a rubber spatula to scrape the bottom and sides of the mixing bowl, then add the eggs one at a time, scraping the bowl after each addition and mixing a medium speed until well-combined. Add the vanilla and almond extracts and mix at low speed until combined. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl well, ensuring the batter is cohesively mixed.
• In a medium, high-sided bowl, whisk the room-temperature sour cream and coffee together (careful - this splashes!).
• In a separate large bowl, whisk together the all-purpose flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Ensure you've broken up any large clumps with your whisk, or use a sifter if you prefer.
• Add the dry ingredients and the coffee-cream mixture to the mixing bowl in alternate stages on medium-low speed, starting with ⅓ the flour, ½ the coffee-cream, another ⅓ flour, the remaining ½ coffee-cream, and then ending with the last ⅓ flour. After each addition, scrape the bowl well. After the final addition, increase the speed to medium and mix for 1 minute, until the batter is fluffy, smooth, and glossy.
• Divide batter between the prepared cake pans, about ~900 grams each. Bake until cakes they dome slightly and a toothpick comes out clean, about 40 minutes total, rotating them halfway through. The sides should be just starting to pull away from the cake pans.
• Cool cakes directly in their pans for 1 hour, then run a butter knife around the edges to loosen. Invert onto a wire rack, peel off the parchment, and return cakes right side up (covered in plastic, the cakes can be left at room temperature for a few hours). Prepare the brown butter frosting.

Brown Butter Frosting

• In a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, beat the room temperature browned butter on medium speed until smooth and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the powdered sugar in three additions, scraping the bowl well after beating each addition for about 30 seconds. After the second addition, the frosting mixture will likely look very dry and crumbly. Add the vanilla extract, vanilla bean seeds (if using), salt, and whole milk to the beaten frosting. Beat on medium speed until mostly incorporated, then add the remaining third of powdered sugar.
• Scrape down the bowl and replace the paddle attachment with a whisk. With the mixer running on low, add the cream very slowly, pausing every 5-10 seconds to scrape down the bowl, until it is fully combined. Increase the speed to medium-high and whisk until light and completely smooth, about 3 minutes, scraping down the bowl as necessary (at least several times) Do not short-change the time you give to this step – the frosting should visibly thicken and lighten in color during this time.

Assembly

• If your cakes domed in the oven, level the tops. (This gives you lots of sampler pieces.)
• To assemble the cake, place one layer of the chocolate cake on a serving platter. Top with a generous 1 cup of the brown butter frosting (or ½ of the frosting if you’re making a naked cake). Spread evenly over the surface, then top with the second layer of chocolate cake.
• Crumb coat the top and sides with a thin layer of frosting, then refrigerate for 10-15 minutes to "set". Finish frosting the top and sides (or just fully frost the top) with the remaining brown butter frosting.
• Chill for 30 min to fully set the cake and frosting before trying to transport this cake! If you aren't transporting this cake, it's still wise to chill before serving to help with meticulous slices. Because the frosting has a cream base, store any uneaten cake in the fridge, letting it come to room temperature before serving.