Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Fudge Frosting for Steve and Justine

Recently, my friends Steve and Justine celebrated their birthday.  I would be seeing both of them (separately) and wanted to make them cake, but I didn't want to make two separate cakes.  In comes the recipe for Chocolate Cake with Blackberry Buttercream Frosting from Lomelino's Cakes.  I made the full recipe for the base chocolate cake, and made five layers using my Wilton 6" layer cake tins.  I then made two cakes with two layers each.  Each layer was filled with strained raspberry jam and chocolate fudge frosting, then frosted all over with the fudge frosting before decorating.

Here is a peek inside one of the layers (this is the spare 5th layer):

The cake was delightfully moist from the sour cream in the recipe.

Steve's cake was decorated with Coles crunchy chocolate crackle balls, and Justine's cake was decorated with rainbow cachous  and a Dr Oetker wafer flower:

The recipe for the cake is as follows:

1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
2/3 cup sour cream
140g butter
2/3 cup white sugar
1/4 brown sugar (she used Muscovado sugar)
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 eggs

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and spray 5 x Wilton 6" shallow layer cake tins with oil.

Sift the flour, baking powder and baking soda together into a bowl and set aside.

Blend the cocoa with the sour cream in a bowl and set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat together the butter, sugars and vanilla until light and fluffy/  Beat in the eggs, one at a time.

Fold the flour and sour cream mixtures into the batter alternately using a rubber spatula, and combine well.

Divide the batter evenly between the layer tins and bake for ~20 minutes or until cooked through.    

Invert the cakes onto wire racks to cool completely.

For the chocolate fudge frosting, I used the Crabapple Bakery recipe, available here.

To assemble, I warmed 1/2 cup of raspberry jam in the microwave for around 30 seconds, then strained it through a sieve to remove the seeds.  I topped two of the cake layers with the strained jam, then on top of that, I added some of the fudge frosting.  I then placed the second cake layer on top of each of the iced layers, then covered the outside of each cake with frosting ((I did two coats - a crumb coat and a final coat).  I then decorated the cakes as described above.

Each recipient said that they enjoyed their cake, so that was a win, despite some flaws in the execution. That's a win in my books!