My birthday cake of choice is yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Generous with the frosting please, but not completely over the top. You’re looking at my go to. It checks all the boxes – classic, nostalgic, and tender cake layers covered with substantial, deep, thick, chocolate frosting. The frosting is mixed with enough salt to balance out the sweetness, and a good percentage of cream cheese. I resisted the urge to add sprinkles here, but it’s a cake that certainly welcomes them.
Yellow Cake: Technique
There are a number of ways to approach yellow cake, but I’m stuck on the following method for a few compelling reasons. First, because it makes a knockout cake. Second, I can mix the cake batter by hand if I want, without pulling a stand mixer onto the counter. A forever goal of mine. The most common yellow cakes have you cream butter and sugar together and proceed from there. Alternately, Rose Levy Beranbaum popularized a reverse-creaming method in The Cake Bible (1988) where you beat softened butter directly into dry ingredients. Both are great, both methods love a stand mixer. I started taking a third approach when mixing cake batter to bake in our little Airstream oven. Everything in that situation had to be mixed by hand, so I approached cake making more like mixing a pancake batter than anything else. Egg whites were whipped and folded in at the last minute, butter was melted instead of creamed and the result was lofty, rich, beautiful, moist cakes. That’s what you’ll see in today’s recipe.
Yellow Cake: Ingredients
I suspect many of you have most of what you need to make a wonderful yellow cake in your pantry right now. There’s nothing wild going on here, but I have a couple notes related to a key ingredients if you want to take a deeper dive.
- Cornstarch: A lot of cake recipes call for cake flour. It is lower in protein and yields a nice, desirable, tender cake crumb. I rarely buy cake flour, but always keep unbleached all-purpose flour on hand. I use a little trick here to drop the protein in my all-purpose flour by cutting it with a bit of cornstarch. It’s a technique I love to use in my favorite waffle recipe as well – and they’re THE BEST. Pinky swear.
- Cocoa: The cocoa powder in this recipe brings the chocolate color and flavor to the cream cheese spiked, buttercream frosting. Seek out 100% cocoa and experiment with different types. Ghirardelli 100% cocoa powder is readily available, and I’ve had good results using it. Guittard has a number of wonderful cocoa powders and if I see one of those, that’s what I’ll buy. You can go with Dutched cocoa or natural. Experimenting with your cocoa powder is a way to personalize your frosting, so experiment! Find one you love, or make a blend.
- Powdered Sugar: You’re going to make a big bowl of frosting for this cake. Ideally you should sift the powdered sugar for the silkiest frosting, but if I’m being honest, sometimes I’m too lazy. I didn’t bother sifting for my most recent cake, pictured here, and if you don’t mind a homemade looking cake, you can skip sifting as well.
- Eggs: Yellow cake often calls for eggs plus added egg yolks. The extra yolks add yellow to the cake along with richness and some density. I like my cake a shade lighter in texture, so I tend to go with three eggs total – with no added yolks.
Make Ahead Strategy
If you want to make components of this cake ahead of time, I suggest the following.
- To bake cake layers one day ahead: allow baked cake layers to cool completely, wrap well in plastic and frost the next day.
- To bake cake layers more than one day ahead: Bake, cool completely, wrap in plastic wrap and bag, freeze for up to a few weeks. Bring to room temperature before frosting.
- To make frosting up to a few days ahead of time: mix frosting and refrigerate until ready to use. Allow to come up to room temperature, mix until billowy and spreadable adding tiny splashes of milk or buttermilk to loosen the frosting up a bit if needed.
Yellow Cake Variations
- Four Layer Yellow Cake: You will have plenty of frosting to use if you want to slice each of the two cakes in half horizontally to make four thin layers. It makes a slightly taller and more elaborate cake.
- Confetti Yellow Cake: fold 2/3 cup (or more if you love them!) rainbow sprinkles into cake batter along with the last of the whipped egg whites. Save some extra sprinkles for the top of the cake as well!
- Citrus Yellow Cake: add the zest of an orange or two lemons to the wet ingredients. Orange in particular goes beautifully with the chocolate in this cake.
A Few Key Steps & Tips in Photos
Here’s what a few of the steps in making this cake look like in photos.
Folding whipped egg whites into the cake batter, pictured above. Keep folding until you can no longer see those white streaks while maintaining as much volume as possible.
I love my cake pans, but a key to success is preparing them well with butter, parchment, and flour. A prepared cake pan is pictured above with cake batter. Ready to bake!
If you’re nervous about getting cakes out of pans, the key is good preparation of the pans before baking. After baking, allow the cakes to cool a bit. They will shrink away and pull in from the sides (above). Gently run a small offset spatula around the cake pan to release any stuck bits and proceed from there.
This recipe doesn’t skimp on frosting. You’ll have enough to divide your two layers into four if you like. Try to get your cake layers as level as possible (see below), this recipe doesn’t typically dome much for me, but I always arrange the layers “belly” to “belly” resulting in a super flat cake top.
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