Brown Sugar Cake

Okay, so I’ve never been a big fan of cake if it wasn’t chocolate. Maybe it’s because they always turn out dry, or maybe because I have an unhealthy obsession with chocolate, but after making this cake, I can never make a judgement about a non-chocolate cake again. I’m telling you, this is MOIST.

 

I was inspired to make this when flipping through The Forest Feast (MOST AMAZING COOKBOOK) and found a beautiful picture of DELICIOUS strawberries covered in yogurt and brown sugar. Every photograph in the cookbook is stunning, but this one made me drool (did I tell you I love The Forest Feast?).

Anyways, I decided to find a sweet, moist brown sugar cake recipe to make a bed for my strawberries to lay on. Here goes:

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Ingredients

Cake:
3 cups of cake flour
2 sticks of unsalted butter (room temp)
2 cups of packed brown sugar
1 cups of granulated sugar
6 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon of baking soda
¼ teaspoon of salt
1 cup of sour cream
Fruit preserves (I used strawberry)
Frosting:
3 sticks of unsalted butter (room temp)
4 ½ cups of confectioners sugar
½ teaspoon of vanilla extract
Fruit Decoration:
Yogurt (Vanilla, Greek, Plain… you choose!)
Brown sugar
Strawberries
Blueberries
Raspberries

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1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees fahrenheit. Put parchment paper in two 7-inch round cake pans. Butter and flour these pans. In an electric mixer, beat together butter and both sugars until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in 1 egg at a time, and add vanilla extract. In a separate bowl, whisk flour and salt, and in another bowl, combine sour cream and baking soda. Alternating with the sour cream mixture, add 3 separate additions of the flour mixture (start and end with flour).

2. Fill pans with finished batter, and bake for approximately 70-75 mins. Let cake cool in pans for around 30 minutes, then remove from pans and let cake cool completely on a wire rack.

3. While cake is cooling, beat the butter for frosting in a stand mixer on high until creamy, about 2 minutes. Reduce speed to medium, and add confectioners sugar 1 half cup at a time, continuously mixing. Finally, add vanilla extract.

4. Using a knife, remove tops of cakes so each cake is leveled, and cut horizontally to divide each cake in half. Setting up your cake on a cake turntable will be very helpful. On the bottom layer of cake, spoon your fruit preserves into the middle of the cake and spread evenly to cover the middle half of the tier. Then, using a frosting piping bag (or plastic bag cut in the corner), pipe a little less than ⅓ of the frosting around the cake in a circle, leaving ¼ of an inch of room from the outer edge of cake (read: less than! you will need extra frosting to pipe around the outside). Carefully place the next tier of cake on top of the bottom layer, making sure it is aligned. Repeat this step for the following tiers until you put the top tier on the cake.

5. Using the remaining frosting, pipe along the bottom of every layer, filling in the groove between cake tiers. Once you have done so, steadily and evenly spin your cake on the turntable as you use a frosting knife to spread each layer of frosting smoothly onto the cake (this is the “naked cake” look).

6. Garnish the cake with blueberries and raspberries. Lastly, dip your strawberries in your yogurt and then sprinkle or dip them into brown sugar. Arrange on your cake. This step is important to do last  (or right before serving), because the brown sugar will melt into the yogurt pretty quickly.

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Cake Source: Adapted from Martha Stewart’s Brown Sugar Layer Cake with Caramel Buttercream Frosting
Strawberries w/ Yogurt and Brown Sugar Source: Recipe From Erin Gleeson’s The Forest Feast