Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'm going to be showing you how to make a peanut butter
chocolate cake. Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here!
And today, I am so excited to be sharing another carefully
tested, well-researched, and perfected recipe.
This cake is possibly one of the most decadent ones that I have on the blog.
If you love peanut butter and chocolate together, you are going to love this one,
so let's go ahead and get started. First thing you want to do is get
your oven preheating to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Next, you are going to need a large mixing bowl,
and I have 1 and 3/4 cups of all-purpose flour
measured out here. Now we’ll add 1 cup of granulated and one cup of firmly packed light brown sugar.
For today's recipe, I am making a dark chocolate
cake because I think it complements the peanut butter really well,
makes for a really rich cake that's not too sweet. Because of that,
I'm using 3/4 cup of dark cocoa powder.
Now if you don't have dark cocoa powder, you can substitute Dutch processed
cocoa powder instead. We'll also add one
and a half teaspoons of baking soda and 3/4 teaspoon of table salt.
All right, now we'll use a whisk to stir everything together
until these dry ingredients are nicely combined.
I like to try to break up any lumps that might be in the brown sugar.
Now your next ingredient is 1/2 cup of melted,
unsalted butter. I’m going to add this right into the batter.
Of course, scrape that bowl, you want to get all of that butter in there.
And we're also going to be adding two thirds cup of either vegetable or canola oil.
I love using this blend of both butter and oil because you get the best of both worlds here.
You're going to get that rich flavor from the butter,
and you're going to get all of the moisture from the oil.
This is a very moist, tender, and flavorful cake.
And I really credit using the blend of butter and oil for one of the reasons that it turns out
so wonderful. We're also going to be adding two large eggs, and you always want to crack your eggs
in a separate dish, just in case you get any shell in them or in case you have a bad egg.
I don't know if that's ever happened to you, but that's a disaster.
You don't want that. We’ll add those.
And we're also going to be adding 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract.
Now stir these ingredients together,
until everything is really well combined and you have a nice, smooth batter.
You could absolutely use a stand mixer or an electric hand mixer for this step.
But since we're using melted butter, there's no creaming involved,
I think it's just as easy to do it by hand.
All right, next, I have one cup of buttermilk measured out.
I'm going to stir this in and it's going to take a second for everything to come together,
but just stir in that buttermilk until it's completely combined.
Finally, you are going to need 1/2 cup of very hot, or boiling, water or coffee.
Now, I'm just using hot water today, but if you'd like to use hot coffee,
the coffee is actually going to help bring out that chocolate flavor even more,
so, if you have some, I recommend using it.
Now we'll stir this in and because it is so hot
you want to take care when you're stirring everything together that you don't splatter yourself.
Now, with some of my cake recipes
I really stress that you need to be careful about not over-mixing the batter. With many
cakes, especially cakes that are creamed to where you cream the butter
and sugar together,
if you over mix them, the cake’s going to turn out dense
and dry. While it is not impossible to over-mix
this cake, it's much more forgiving.
The way it's made is more similar to the reverse creaming method,
but not exactly. But my point is that it's a lot harder to over-
mix and you're more likely to under-mix.
It's really important that you stir everything together
until you have a smooth, completely lump-free batter.
All right, now for today's cake, I'm going to be making a three-layer cake,
so I have three 8 inch cake pans here.
If you only want to make yours into two—a two-layer cake,
I will include notes in the written recipe so you can make that adjustment instead.
I like the look of the three layers though,
really just adds something to the cake. Now before you add your batter,
you're going to want to grease and flour the pans.
What I do is I will use a baking spray—and this is a baking spray,
not a cooking spray. Baking sprays contain flour.
And I'm just going to spray the sides and use a paper towel to grease them a little bit,
so that it's a nice even layer. Now I am not spraying the bottoms
because instead, I have cut out rounds of parchment paper.
This is my secret weapon when I'm making cakes.
It guarantees that the cake is not going to stick to the pan.
Just drop these in each cake pan
instead. If you don't have parchment paper, you can grease
and flour, or use a flour-based baking spray, to coat the bottom of the pan instead.
All right, now we’ll evenly divide our batter into these pans.
And we’ll take these over to our 350 degree Fahrenheit oven, where they're going to need to bake
for about 22 to 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean,
or with a few moist crumbs. If your oven will not fit all three cake layers at one time,
it is fine to leave one sitting on the counter until the other two are finished
baking. All right, let's take a look at this one.
Now, keep in mind, if you are baking all three cakes
at one time, some may bake faster than the other,
especially if your oven doesn't bake evenly, so make sure you check all of them.
Now this toothpick looks perfect. You’ve got a moist crumb right on the bottom,
but you don't have any wet batter,
so what we'll do is we'll let the cake cool in the cake pan for 10 minutes.
After 10 minutes, you'll want to take a butter knife and just run that around the edge of the cake,
just in case it stuck any. And then carefully
invert it onto a cooling rack to cool completely.
I’m just showing you one of the cake layers, but I have the other two ready as well.
Now anytime you make a cake, you want to make sure the cake layers
have cooled completely before you add frosting.
Otherwise, the frosting will melt and you'll have a big mess on your hands.
Now these will cool pretty quickly, so at this point,
I'm going to go ahead and start making my peanut butter frosting.
Now, when you're making this cake, you've got three layers to ice,
I like to have a nice, pretty peanut butter frosting ring on top
where it's a nice decorative piped topping,
so I make a lot of frosting for this recipe.
If you don't want to use as much, that's fine. You can scale this recipe down.
But I'm basically making a double batch of my peanut butter frosting. Because of that,
I don't want to use an electric mixer, you could, it would just be kind of messy,
so I'm going to be using my stand mixer.
Now this is a big batch of frosting,
and, in fact, we are going to need four sticks, or this is two cups, of
softened, unsalted butter. We’ll add those right into our mixing bowl.
I also have here, one cup of creamy peanut butter.
I don't recommend using a natural peanut butter where the oil separates to the top
because that can make your frosting kind of greasy.
It doesn't come together quite the way I like it too, so
just stick with regular, creamy peanut butter,
not the natural kind. We’ll add this in with our butter.
And I have my mixer fitted with my paddle attachment,
and I'm just going to stir the peanut butter
and the butter together until they're smooth and creamy.
All right, we're making a lot of frosting today, so we need a lot of sugar.
I have 6 cups of powdered sugar measured out here.
Now I am just going to add a small bit of the sugar at a time.
This is just a half cup measuring cup. You can use a spoon or whatever.
I'm just going to scoop out some of that sugar and drop it in with my butter and peanut butter.
Keep your mixer speed on low, that way you don't send powdered sugar flying everywhere
and have it all over your kitchen.
And we're just going to continue to gradually add the sugar
until we've added all of it.
Once you've added all your sugar, you do want to take a look
and scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl as needed
because sometimes some of that sugar likes to sit on the bottom of the bowl,
or sometimes you'll have peanut butter that didn't quite get mixed in,
so you always want to check that. Now
for flavor for our frosting, we are going to add two teaspoons of vanilla extract.
I’m actually going to turn my mixer to low speed. And we're also going to add 3/4 teaspoon of salt. Now
stir these in until the vanilla and salt are well incorporated.
Finally, I have four tablespoons,
or 1/4 cup, of whole milk measured out
here, and I'm going to gradually add this to the peanut butter mixture
until I get a nice consistency.
What I'm looking for is a nice, smooth, spreadable consistency, one that's going to pipe really well.
I don't want the frosting to be too stiff and too dry. I’m going to start
by adding about 2 tablespoons. And add as much milk as you need until you get to that consistency.
You may not need the full 1/4 cup.
As you can see, I have a little bit left in my measuring cup here.
And I feel pretty good about this consistency, so I’m not going
to go any further. And I do want to make sure that you get a look at
just how nice and smooth
the consistency of this frosting is.
All right, so by now my cake layers have cooled,
so let's start assembly. Now, typically when you make a cake,
if you want a nice level cake, you're going to have to level off your cake layers.
You can certainly do that. I'm going to be serving this cake to family.
I don't care if it’s a little bit lopsided,
so I'm not going to be leveling my cake layers today.
I’m also not a professional cake decorator, and I'm not selling this cake
to anybody, so keep that in mind. Now,
just to help keep the cake from sliding around on the serving dish,
I'm just going to put a little bit, a little dollop, of frosting right on the center. Then carefully
place your cake layer. Now this is a peanut butter chocolate cake,
it's super decadent. It's supposed to be decadent,
so I like to put a lot of frosting between my cake layers.
That's why we made so much,
so we have enough to cover the whole cake.
And you want to make this layer as nice and even as possible.
We'll add our next layer, and just do the same thing.
And finally, our third layer.
Now, today I'm going to be showing you really quickly how to do a crumb coating.
I love using this method because
what it does is we'll take our frosting,
and we'll use our spatula to do a thin layer of frosting all the way around the cake.
And it looks terrible,
right? Like we're catching all of the crumbs.
It looks super messy. It's supposed to.
This is just going to make it so that when we add the rest of our frosting,
we have a nice smooth layer and we don't have any crumbs in that one.
So this is our crumb coating.
What I recommend is just dropping this in your freezer for about 15 minutes
to let that solidify a little bit. That's going to hold all the crumbs in place.
All right, now after 15 minutes, let's take a look.
Still looks pretty terrible, that's fine. We're going to grab our frosting
and look how easily this goes over the crumb coating.
I just want to make sure you can see the difference between—there's your crumb coating,
and here is our nice smooth layer on top of that,
that's not catching any crumbs. So you're just going to do a nice, thick,
even layer all the way around the cake.
And for the top of the cake, it's not
as important because we're going to be covering this with ganache.
If you're not covering yours with ganache, make sure you don't
have any crumbs visible in the top layer either.
Now for today's cake, I'm going to be covering this with some ganache.
I'm going to be doing a really simple drip on the cake.
I'm going to show you how to do this. I recently share your chocolate ganache recipe.
It's super simple. You only need a half batch
if you would like to decorate the cake the way that I've shown in my photos. Now
before doing the chocolate ganache, typically, I do like to put the cake back in the freezer,
or in the fridge, for about 15 minutes or so.
It makes the drip a lot less likely to go all the way to the bottom of the cake.
It just makes it go on nicer. You also want to make sure your ganache isn't too hot. Now
I like to use a squeeze bottle whenever I am doing a ganache drip,
but you can really get the same effect with a piping bag with the corner
snipped off, just a small corner snipped. Now
once your cake has chilled a little bit longer, let me show you exactly how we do that
drip. Again, I'm not a professional cake decorator,
but I just think this is so easy and it adds such a nice touch.
We're just going to go around the edge of the cake,
doing really simple drops,
just kind of nudging them over the edge.
Once you've gone all the way around the cake, we are just going to take that ganache
and drizzle it all over the top.
Now you don't want to go too crazy here. You want to have just a thin layer of ganache
because in a second,
let me show you. I'm going to be smoothing this with an offset spatula.
And if I put too much ganache on here,
it's just going to run over the edges and it's going to completely soak up our drip that we did.
It's going to be a mess, so don't go too heavy on the ganache.
You might not need all of the ganache that you prepared.
There we go. That looks pretty good. Now, you could be done here,
but, as I mentioned, I still have more peanut butter frosting that I saved just for this occasion.
I’m going to pipe it on top. Again, you want to let this ganache firm up a little bit
first. You can speed that up by dropping it in the fridge.
Once the ganache has firmed up, grab what's left of your peanut butter frosting.
Now, this, I put in a bag fitted with an 848
piping tip—Ateco 848—and we're just going to pipe it on top of the firm ganache.
My ganache is a little bit soft still,
but it's firm enough that the frosting isn't going to melt or slide off.
Okay, even though I know my ganache could be a little bit more firm,
I am ready to go ahead and cut into this cake,
so let's go ahead and take a look. I always like to wipe off my knife between cuts,
maked things a little bit cleaner.
Let's take a look. And that is how you make this super decadent, incredibly rich peanut butter
and chocolate cake.
I really hope you guys enjoyed today's recipe. And if you try this one out,
please let me know what you think—and make sure to tag me on Instagram.
I love seeing your pictures. I want to see how you did with the
decoration too. I'm sure you did better than I did.
Thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.
My favorite part.
You're going to love this.