Chocolate Coffee Cake

Bernice Baran
Apr 3, 2018
3 min read

Hello friends.

I made another cake!

...and this time I recorded it

I know it's not all springy like my lemon poppyseed cake butttttt just look at it.

It's got seven layers of brownie goodness with THE WORST BUT THE BEST COFFEE BUTTERCREAM IN THE WORLD!

I never knew why a lot of people were intimidated to make a Swiss buttercream... but now I know, lol. On the bright side, you can almost always rescue it. Make sure to watch my video to see all the stages it went through before becoming a beautiful, silky buttercream.

It really wasn't that hard to make, I'm exaggerating so go ahead and try it, I promise you won't regret it!

CHOCOLATE COFFEE CAKE

7-layer 8-inch cake

INGREDIENTS:

Cake

4 eggs
3 ½ cups flour
1 ½ cup cocoa powder
4 cups sugar
2 cups buttermilk
1 cup oil
2 cups coffee
1 ½ tsp. baking soda
1 tbsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. vanilla

Swiss Buttercream

8 egg whites
2 cups sugar
1 ½ cups butter, softened and cubed
½ tbsp vanilla paste
2 tbsp. espresso powder w/ 2 oz. hot water
1 tsp. hazelnut extract *optiona
¼ tsp salt

Chocolate Ganache

1 cup chocolate ganache
½ cup heavy cream
1 tbsp. espresso or espresso powder in 1 oz. hot water

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 350F and grease cake pans.
Mix together dry ingredient and set aside.
Beat together eggs and sugar with whisk attachment.
Add in buttermilk, oil, coffee, and vanilla.
Mix until well combined.
Slowly add in dry ingredients and mix until well combined.
Pour into cake pans and bake for 22 minutes.*
Meanwhile, whisk together egg whites and sugar over a double boiler until sugar is fully dissolves.**
Place in bowl in stand mixer, add in salt and with whisk attachment, beat until stiff peaks form.
Once the bowl feels room temperature (NOT WARM), with mixer on medium speed, slowly add in cubes of butter, one at a time until fully combined.
Add in coffee and vanilla and beat until well combined.***
Once cakes have cooled, begin to frost cake.
Place frosted cake in refrigerator.
Heat up heavy cream in saucepan or microwave.
Pour over chocolate and give it a minute to melt before mixing.
Add in espresso and mix until silky smooth.
Pour over cake and push some over the edge to create drizzle.

LOVE NOTES:

*I started with half this recipe and baked four 8 inch cakes and then decided I wanted it taller so I baked another batch and I only used seven layers total.
You could bake this entire batch in four pans and leave them as thicker layers or cut them in half once they're baked. You may have to adjust baking time for this.
**When sugar is fully dissolved, you won't feel any sugar granules when you touch the mixture.
***My buttercream was very soft so I refrigerated it overnight (some Swiss buttercream troubleshoot articles say to refrigerate it for 20-30 minutes and then beat again but that didn't work for me) and then in the morning when I went to beat it, it curdled - looked like cottage cheese-ish. So I took a cup of my curdled buttercream (per troubleshoot articles) and microwaved it for 20 seconds and then, with mixer beating on low, I slowly poured it back in. Then beat on high for a few seconds and like magic, it emulsified into a beautiful, thick buttercream!
I adjusted some ingredients from the video (i.e. I had way to much ganache so I lowered the amount of ingredient in the recipe).

Thanks for reading guys and make sure watch my first baking video ever! If you have any questions at all comment down below and please give it a thumbs up if you liked the video. If you have any requests for future videos, please let me know! Go be a blessing to someone and make them this cake, as always