Brown Sugar Buttermilk Raspberry Cake with Fudge Frosting

Layered is a stunning new cookbook entirely devoted to scrumptious layer cakes. It's written by Tessa Huff, who used to have her own custom cake shop and now shares her gorgeous creations and decorating tips at Sweet Style CA. I pre-ordered her book purely because her blog is so immaculate and not covered in ads and annoying pop-ups. That's a good reason, right? My immediate problem after flipping through Layered was I wanted to make almost every single cake ... and there are 150 cakes, which works out to one cake a day for the next 5 months. Purely based on the effort involved in making her go-to Swiss meringue buttercream, there's no way I could manage that pace. Still, I foresee a lot of cake in my (co-workers') future, especially given how well this raspberry cake and accompanying fudge frosting turned out.

Tessa's photography for her brown sugar blood orange thyme cake convinced me that it needed to be one of the very first cakes I made. Unfortunately for my intentions to make the recipe as written first, when I asked what kind of cake my co-worker with an upcoming birthday wanted, he picked chocolate raspberry. Since Tessa encourages the reader to mix and match her cake and frosting recipes, and raspberry didn't seem like a tremendous leap from blood orange, I converted her recipe to incorporate raspberry in the cake batter and paired it with her birthday cake fudge frosting. Thus, this brown sugar buttermilk raspberry cake with fudge frosting was born.  Making the cake layers is pretty simple. Just cream together your butter and sugar, add the eggs and vanilla, and then the buttermilk and flour in a series of three additions. If you don't have cake flour or buttermilk, convert your all-purpose flour to cake flour with the help of some cornstarch (see recipe note) and add a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar to whatever milk you have on hand to make it "buttermilk". I used raspberry jam for a hint of raspberry in the cake itself, although I think it would be even better with de-seeded raspberry puree. The recipe yields three layers if baked in 8-inch cake pans. If you don't have 8-inch cake pans, you can easily convert the cooking time and baking vessel using this wisdom from Alice Medrich. The final brown sugar buttermilk raspberry cake is really delicate tasting, while the crumb itself is rich, buttery, and very moist. Spread a thin layer of good raspberry jam on top of each cake layer before frosting them, this pulls out more raspberry flavor from the cake and also keeps the layers from drying out. I picked the fudge frosting from Tessa's birthday cake recipe in large part because it's so much simpler to make than most of her frosting recipes. Just whip the butter, add your sugar, cocoa powder, salt and vanilla, then the cream, and finally the chocolate. That's it - way faster than the old-fashioned buttercream recipe most of the Baked cakes rely on and vastly easier on my arm than Swiss meringue buttercream originally paired with the blood orange cake. Tessa's fudge frosting is really rich and this recipe makes a lot of frosting. I love frosting, so I had no complaints, but several people only managed to eat a portion of the frosting on their slice of cake. Personally, I think this frosting would go well on pretty much any cake - obviously yellow cake, but also strawberry, chocolate, orange, vanilla, or even an over-the-top banana bread.

Raspberry Cake with Fudge Frosting

This cake is dense, not overly sweet, and has just a hint of raspberry from the jam. The fudge frosting is incredibly chocolatey. Both of them would be incredibly good on their own or married with other flavors, but they work really well together here. Based on two different cakes in Layered.

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Course: Dessert

Cuisine: American

Keyword: layered cakes

Prep Time: 45 minutes minutes

Cook Time: 25 minutes minutes

Total Time: 1 hour hour 10 minutes minutes

Servings: 12 -20 slices

Ingredients

Brown Sugar Buttermilk Raspberry Cake

• 2 ¼ cup (295 g) cake flour*
• 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ¾ cup (170 g) unsalted butter at room temperature
• ¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons (190 g) firmly packed brown sugar
• ½ cup (100 grams) granulated sugar
• 1 ½ tablespoons raspberry puree deseeded ,or jam**
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 3 large eggs
• 1 large egg yolk
• ¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons 210 ml buttermilk

Raspberry Filling

• ¼ cup raspberry jam

Fudge Frosting

• 1 ½ cups (340 g) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 5 ½ cups (690 g) confectioner's sugar
• ½ cup (50 g) unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 ½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• ⅛ teaspoon salt
• ¼ cup (60 ml) heavy cream or milk
• 8 ounces (225 g) semisweet chocolate, melted and cooled***

Instructions

Brown Sugar Buttermilk Raspberry Cake

• Preheat the oven to 350ºF (175ºC). Grease and flour three 8-inch⋇ cake pans, set aside.
• Sift or stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
• Using a mixer, beat the butter on medium speed until smooth. Add the sugars and the raspberry jam**. Turn speed up to medium high, continue mixing until the butter mixture is fluffy and lighter in color, about 3-5 minutes. Scrape down the bowl.
• On medium-low speed, add the vanilla, then the eggs one at a time, then the egg yolk, scraping down the bowl after each addition.
• Alternate addition of the flour and buttermilk on low speed in three stages, beginning and ending with the flour. Once dry ingredients are just incorporated, turn mixer speed up to medium and mix no more than 30 seconds.
• Evenly divide the batter into the prepared pans and bake about 20-25 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean and the sides of the cake begin to pull away from the pan.
• Let cool in the pan on a metal rack for at least 10-15 minutes, then turn the cake out onto the cooling rack to finish cooling.

Assembly

• Once cake is completely cool, level them (if you want) and choose bottom layer. Place on serving dish.
• Spread about 1-2 tablespoons of raspberry jam in a thin layer across the top of the bottom layer.
• Top with ¾ cup to 1 cup of the fudge frosting, gently smoothly on the frosting so as not to disturb the jam underneath.
• Place the second layer of cake on top, repeat the layer of jam and layer of frosting.
• Place the final layer of cake on top, then use the remaining frosting to cover the top and sides of the cake, filling in any gaps between the layers. This frosting spreads really well, and you shouldn't need to bother with applying a crumb coat first.

Fudge Frosting

• Using a mixer, beat the butter until smooth and creamy.
• Gradually add the confectioner's sugar, cocoa powder, vanilla, and salt while running the mixer on low.
• Pour in the cream and continue mixing until fully incorporated.
• Increase to medium-high speed and mix until frosting is fluffy and looks whipped, which should take a couple minutes.
• Scrape down the bowl, add the chocolate, mix until smooth.

Notes

*If you don't have cake flour, replace 2 tablespoons of each cup of flour with 2 tablespoons of cornstarch (so here you would use 2 cups minus 1 tablespoon of all-purpose flour, plus 5 tablespoons cornstarch)
**The original recipe is for a blood orange cake and calls for the equivalent amount of blood orange zest.
***I actually used Nutella instead of semisweet chocolate when I made this. It was good, but honestly you couldn't really taste the Nutella in the final frosting so it seemed like a huge waste of Nutella (which is a tragedy).
⋇If you don't have an 8-inch cake pan, you can easily make this recipe in whatever cake pan sizes you do have. Just follow Alice Medrich's advice on converting the recipe or look to this post from Allrecipes for guidance.