Hey everyone it's Sam here from Sugar Spun Run and today I'll be showing you how to make my favorite birthday cake recipe.
Everyone should have a good classic go-to birthday cake recipe and today I'm sharing mine, in honor of my
website's fourth birthday. Now this recipe is pretty simple. It yields a
three layer moist vanilla cake that's packed full of sprinkles. It's pretty
simple to make so let's get started. Now the first thing you'll want to do is
pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Next, for your ingredients,
you're going to need one cup plus 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter, and you
want this to be softened to room temperature. I'm going to add mine to the
bowl of a stand mixer, and if you don't have a stand mixer, you can certainly use
an electric hand mixer instead. Now that I've added my butter I'm going to turn
my mixer on to low speed and I'm just gonna stir this butter until it's nice and creamy.
Now we'll add our sugar, and you will need 3 cups of granulated sugar.
I know it seems like a lot, but remember we're making a 3 layer cake today. So now
that we've added our sugar, turn your mixer back to medium speed and we'll
beat until the sugar and butter are nicely combined.
Now we'll add our eggs. You'll need 3 large eggs and you want these to be at room temperature. We're
going to add them one at a time with our mixer on low speed until each is combined.
Next we'll stir in 1 tablespoon of pure vanilla extract.
Now that we have our wet ingredients prepped, you're going to need a separate bowl for your dry
ingredients. You will need 4 cups plus 2 tablespoons of cake flour for this recipe.
Add 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda.
1 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of salt. We'll just whisk these together until
everything is completely combined. We are just about ready to combine our wet and
dry ingredients to make our birthday cake batter, but there's still one more
ingredient you need, and that is 2 cups of buttermilk. Now, the way we're going to
do this is; we're going to alternate adding our flour mixture and our
buttermilk. You're going to add some of the flour mixture stir until it's just
combined. Add some of the buttermilk and then stir until that's just combined, and
then repeat until you have used up all of your flour and all of your buttermilk.
Now I always recommend starting and finishing with the flour mixture. I'll
usually add that in about 4 or 5 parts and the buttermilk in about 3 or 4 parts.
Another thing I want to note is that I always do this part by hand. You do not
want to over mix this cake, or it could easily end up too dense. So we're just
going to stir these in by hand using a spatula.
Do not use an electric or stand mixer at this point.
Once our last addition of flour is almost completely absorbed; now we are going to add in our sprinkles. You
will want to use a heaping 1/2 cup of sprinkles for this birthday cake.
Now we're going to divide our batter evenly into three eighth inch, or nine inch pans.
I'm using eight inch pans today, and I've already greased the sides of the pan
with baking spray. You can grease and flour them instead, and I'm also going to
line the bottom of each pan with a round of parchment paper. This is a foolproof
way to keep the cakes from sticking to the pan. I'm just gonna use my spatula to smooth the surface of the cake batter.
And now our cakes are ready to bake.
So we're going to transfer these to our 350 degrees Fahrenheit oven, where they'll
bake for about 30 to 34 minutes or until they're nice golden brown on top, and a
toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, or preferably with a few moist crumbs.
So this is looking pretty good. So we're going to let these cakes cool for
about ten minutes in their pan, and after 10 minutes, I'm just gonna take a butter
knife and I'm just gonna run that around the inside of the pan. Just to loosen the cake
from the pan, in case it's stuck anywhere, and then you're going to want to carefully invert it onto a cooling rack.
It's very important that these cakes cool completely before you frost them. Now for the frosting, I'm
going to be using my chocolate cream cheese frosting. It's very simple to make
so let's head over to the stand mixer. We are going to add 3/4 cup of softened
unsalted butter. 12 ounces of softened cream cheese.
1/4 teaspoon of salt and 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract. Now if you don't have a stand
mixer you can certainly use an electric hand mixer instead. That will be fine. I
just prefer to use my stand mixer it makes it a little easier. So now I'm going to
cream together the butter and cream cheese and the rest of the ingredients
I've added until everything is smooth and creamy.
Now we need our powdered sugar. We're going to gradually add this to the rest of our ingredients with our
mixer on low speed so the sugar doesn't go flying everywhere.
You need a whopping 5 and 1/4 cup of powdered sugar.
A lot but remember we're frosting a big three layer cake here.
Okay well that powdered sugar explosion was exactly what I was trying to avoid.
So let me take this opportunity to show you one of my favorite tricks for
preventing powdered sugar from going everywhere. What we'll do is, let me add a
little bit more powdered sugar to this bowl.
And now I'll just cover the bowl and the stand mixer with a clean dish towel.
That way if any powdered sugar goes flying like it just did on me, this time it'll be trapped by the towel, and
it's not going to get all over your kitchen. So now let me turn the speed
to low. See how nice and clean that was. I'm going to add the rest of the sugar in
And I know this doesn't give you a lot to watch on video but I'm going to cover
the bowl again it's gonna keep me from cleaning up a giant mess in my kitchen.
Ok, so that went over a lot better a lot neater. So now we can add our cocoa powder.
You will need 3/4 cup of cocoa powder I'm using natural cocoa powder. As you
can see I've got a little sugar in it when we had our explosion earlier.
Alright we survived making our large batch of chocolate cream cheese frosting so
let's go ahead and assemble our cakes.
and of course no birthday cake would be complete without some sprinkles.
Alright now there's nothing else to do but dig into our birthday cake
And there you have the perfect birthday cake recipe. I really hope you guys will
try this one out. if you do please let me know what you think. I always love
hearing from you. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time.
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