How To Make A Vintage Heart Shaped Cake | Coffee 100 Ways

Love is in the air, and it smells like coffee and chocolate. I don't know about you, but I've been seeing these vintage cakes online everywhere, and I'm really excited to make one. Hi, I'm Raquel. I'm a culinary producer at Tasty, and today we're gonna make a vintage heart-shaped mocha cake. Warning, one bite of this cake may make you fall in love. To make the batter, first we're gonna start with our dry ingredients. So we've got flour. I like to use both granulated sugar and brown sugar because brown sugar has molasses in it, which gives the cake a really dense, caramelly-rich kind of flavor, and then the granulated sugar keeps it nice and fluffy. I also do this when I'm making brownies. Next, we've got our cocoa powder, of course. I wanna keep a nice, dense, rich, moist cake, so I'm using instant espresso. Next, we have our baking powder and our baking soda. Of course, some salt. Now we whisk together. So you just wanna whisk until you don't see any more of those flour streaks, and there's no clumps from the brown sugar, and it looks happy and all mixed in. Now we're gonna move on to our wet ingredients. We have our vegetable oil. Sour cream keeps the batter nice and moist, and I think it's perfect for this cake. It goes really well with coffee. Then we are going to add our eggs, and then vanilla. Vanilla always brings out all those different notes of anything in the batter. The coffee, the chocolate, whisk. Just get them all nice and combined. We'll bring back our dry mix, and we're gonna incorporate it into our wet mix. I really like to do this in batches, in a bowl, by hand, and not use a hand mixer or a stand mixer because I don't wanna overbeat it. And if you overbeat it, the gluten develops, and then you get a really high dome in your cake. Add some more. And when you're doing this, make sure you scrape down the sides so you're really getting everything back into the batter. I smell the espresso. So this batter is looking kind of like a brownie batter, almost. So it should be tacky, it should be thick, and you can hear when it's ready. Do you hear that? Let's get it in the molds. I'm in love. These red heart-shaped molds are the cutest, and silicone molds work really well because they come out super easy. But you still wanna grease it. So this is gonna be a three-layer cake, so we are using three different molds so that we can get nice, thin layers when we stack our cake. Now we're gonna put the batter into the molds. This cake is gonna be really moist. And you just wanna spread it out a little bit. Our silicone molds are filled, and now we're gonna place them on a baking sheet so that they stay nice and stable when they're in the oven. These are gonna bake for 30 to 35 minutes at 350 degrees, and you'll know they're ready when you stick a toothpick inside and the center comes out clean. Now we're gonna make our mocha buttercream. In this cake, there are three frostings, but this one is kind of like the base of the cake. So let's get mixing with the butter. This is a big recipe because we are frosting a three-layered cake. You need some for every part of the cake, for building it, for frosting it, for decorating it. We're gonna beat for about four minutes until it's light and fluffy. While the butter is beating, we are going to mix cocoa powder, espresso, and salt into our powdered sugar. This is buttercream. It's light, it's fluffy, it's whipped. This is gonna be so good. Our next step, add our powdered sugar, espresso, mocha mix, one cup at a time. You're gonna scrape down in between. I promise, it's worth it. We're gonna add one more cup, and then we're gonna repeat this process until you're all done. Oops. So at this point, the buttercream is really thick and it needs some liquid. So we're gonna add our heavy cream as the buttercream is working in the stand mixer. After that, we'll add our vanilla. I think it's ready. Look at that. You cannot beat buttercream. This is a really quick and easy way to make ganache, and it cuts down on dishes and a lot of different steps. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna add our chocolate. I'm using a really dark, high-cocoa chocolate, and this will make the ganache super rich and delicious. Now we're gonna add our heavy whipping cream, and now you just pop it in the microwave at 30-second intervals. So this is gonna take about three minutes, and you're gonna stir in between just to make sure that no chocolate is stuck to the bottom and it doesn't burn. We did our last interval. So again, our instant espresso powder, vanilla, and this is my secret, a rum. This is my version of a rum martini. So gently just stir it in. Coffee, rum, the chocolate has melted, all of the flavors are together, and we have our chocolate espresso ganache. We are making our final frosting, our chocolate espresso buttercream. Same as the first buttercream, we're gonna start with a lot of butter. This is going to beat for about four minutes, and then we'll add our sugar, one cup at a time. There's a science behind all of this. Okay, scraping down a little bit, the last cup. Now we're gonna add our ganache. This is half of the recipe that we just made. We're gonna add this in three batches. This is looking really good, but we wanna thin it out a little bit with some heavy cream, so we'll add that. I start with just a little bit, and then I incorporate it based on how thick or thin I want the frosting. And then of course, a little salt. This looks done. This is really good. Should we do the fun part and start assembling our three-layered heart mocha cake? Let's do it. So the step we're doing right now is shaving this top dome off, because when you do a layered cake, you really want the layers to be nice and even. So I go very slow, and if you have to do it a couple times, that's fine. You just wanna shave the top off. You do not want to go too deep. We're gonna repeat this process with the other two cakes. We're ready to assemble. We have our mocha buttercream, and we're gonna pipe a tiny bit right in the center of the board. What I like to do is I like to have this as the side that goes up. Place it like that. Now it's time to make the buttercream dam. You're just gonna pipe a little bit around the perimeter of the heart. Now we have a little bit of our ganache. It's a nice, light layer, but it adds so much flavor. Next, we're gonna pipe the buttercream and fill it in. Now we're gonna just even out the buttercream, but we're gonna keep the dam intact, and it's gonna keep everything nice and neat. We're gonna just repeat this step two more times. Repeat the same process for the top layer. We're gonna frost the outside of the cake, and then we're gonna let it chill for 20 minutes in the refrigerator. I found a little trick. What you do is you wanna cut the top off so it stays nice and neat. You're gonna be piping over this, so it doesn't have to be perfect. Now we're gonna just add a little bit more frosting, and we're gonna smooth it over. Using a bench scraper, smooth out the cake. We have reached the end, the most fun part. The cake is ready for the piping. So we have our chocolate espresso buttercream, and we are going to start piping around the perimeter of the heart. We're using a 6B or an open star, and it's one of the bigger sizes, and we're gonna pipe shells around the perimeter of the heart. Round two. With a little smaller star piping tip, we are going to start piping the mocha buttercream. Vintage cake gained its popularity in the 18th century, has some roots with rococo, but then it came back into fashion in the 1950s. It's very whimsical, and yeah, it's super playful. Voila, we did it, and we're just gonna repeat this process on the bottom. We've finished the piping. I've done the top, the bottom, and I added little curtains to the side. So now we're gonna just add a few gold pearls. You could pipe a little message on top if you're good at piping, or you could use little fondant letters, which I'm using because I think they're super cute, and they give like a Valentine's Day vibe. Look how good this cake looks. I am so excited. It has dotes of espresso and chocolate and really lush layers of cake. It was really fun to make, and like any great romance, it takes a little bit of work and patience, but the end result speaks for itself. Thank you guys for coming on this vintage cake journey with me. Let me know if there are any other coffee recipes you want to try. There's so many. Be creative.