How to bake a perfect, chocolate birthday cake!

This past weekend was my good friend Alicia’s birthday. I’m a bit of a cake fanatic so I volunteered to bake a birthday cake to help celebrate her big day. Her sister threw a “Sex and the City” themed party, so I thought it would be fun to make a themed cake as well. A quick Google search gave me many options on how to decorate my cake and I settled on using pink and black fondant as my main colours.

Next up was the cake. What girl doesn’t love chocolate? One of my new go-to cake recipes has to be our Chocolate cake with mocha frosting. Although our readers are just seeing this recipe now in our February issue, we actually developed this back in September 2010, which means I’ve now baked this cake for several birthdays!

One of the things I love about this cake is that it doesn’t rise too much when it bakes, and remains fairly flat-topped. This makes it so much easier to frost and decorate. Depending on my mood, I sometimes omit the coffee/espresso in the icing (especially if there will be kids eating the cake). It doesn’t affect the decadence of the cake at all. We recommend keeping the cake for just two days at room temperature—a past birthday cake beneficiary admitted to eating his over a week and it still tasted delicious. (But we still recommend following our guidelines).

Our Chocolate cake with mocha frosting

For this version of the cake recipe, I made 1 ½ batches. One batch for the bottom tier, and a half batch for the second tier, though one batch of the icing was enough—I just frosted a thin layer of the icing on the top and sides for the fondant to adhere. The result was a smashing success and everyone loved the cake! And check out the fun martinis and cupcakes made by Alicia’s sister, Sonja!

Happy birthday!