Raspberry Chocolate Cake

Ok, so I didn’t actually make this cake…but it was for me! 🙂 As a baker I’m usually the one making a dessert or cake for someone whether it’s their birthday, a special occasion, a friends gathering, or simply because my family members want something sweet. If you remember, I even baked my own birthday cake last year. So this year for my birthday, my sister Abby offered to bake me a cake. It’s been a while since I’ve had someone bake something for me, so I totally let her do it and make it however she wanted.

She got a chocolate cake recipe off the back of the cocoa powder box from Trader Joe’s. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I tend not to trust those kinds of recipes too much, but then again that’s how I got our chocolate chip cookie recipe (of course I tweaked a few things).

After all, they called it “The Greatest and Easiest Chocolate Cake” so it couldn’t be that bad. 🙂 Plus it had buttermilk in it so it sounded like a moist cake

Abby chose to make this chocolate cake and fill it with raspberry frosting

I had a beach picnic/celebration with one of my friends who also had her birthday two days after mine. So this cake was for both of us and Abby really wanted to make it special, especially when she saw this idea of piping roses on cake from Pinterest.

Almost up until we left for the beach, Abby was meticulously piping each rose on the cake, sometimes even redoing some. She definitely has more patience than I do. Although I’ve never tried piping roses before, I don’t think I would have the patience to stay that long if I would ever try it. But it actually paid off because it turned out a beautiful cake! And mind you, this is the first time she made a cake by herself!

The recipe actually yielded 2 cakes, but since she ran out of time, we only had one with roses and the other one was just covered in the chocolate frosting

So we used this one as our cake (as you can see 2 candles for two birthday girls) and kept the other one for extra pieces in case there wasn’t enough.

I had so much fun celebrating my birthday with my friend, and it was nice to have a cake done especially for me! The cake came out absolutely delicious and our friends loved it! They love chocolate so this was the perfect cake for them. They actually loved it so much that we made it again for the 4th of July when they came over. 🙂

Thank you Abby for such a great cake for my birthday!!

Raspberry Chocolate Cake:

(The Greatest and Easiest Chocolate Cake from the Trader Joe’s cocoa powder)

Ingredients:

3 1/3 cups flour
1 1/3 cups cocoa powder
3 cups sugar
1 Tbsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
12 oz. butter
3 cups buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla
5 eggs

For the Frosting:
2 Stick of Unsalted Butter, softened
1 cup Raspberry Preserves
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
2 16oz Box of Powdered Sugar
1/2 of a lemon juice

Extra frosting for the top

1 sticks butter
8 oz. powder sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two 9” round baking pans or line cupcake cupcake cups with paper liners. Place all ingredients in electric mixer bowl and beat on high speed for 3 minutes, scraping down sides of bowl once during mixing. Pour into prepared pans or cupcake cups. Bake cakes for about 55 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean, or bake cupcakes for 20-25 minutes.

To make the frosting, place all the ingredients in a bowl and mix until everything in incorporated (about 1 min.). Divide the frosting in 2. Cut each cake in half and spread half of the frosting in the middle. Place the tops of the cakes on each cake and cover them with either chocolate or vanilla frosting. It’s really up to you if you want to cover the cake in chocolate frosting or vanilla frosting. Or you can do what we did and do a combination of both.

Enjoy!