Make The Perfect Birthday Cake

This is the only vanilla cake recipe you'll ever need. We'll begin by buttering three 8-inch cake rounds. We're doing three because we're making a three-layer cake, but if you want to make a single layer cake, you'd only need to do this once. Make sure to also butter up the sides. If you brush upwards as opposed to going back and forth like this, it should, in theory, help to guide and lift the cake out of the pan as it bakes. Once they're fully buttered, lay a round of parchment in each pan, and if you don't have pre-cut parchment like I did, you can fold a piece of parchment across like this so you have a square, and then continue folding over and over in triangles until you get a nice pointy shape that looks like this, at which point you can flip over one of your cake pans, place this down with the tip of your parchment somewhere at the center line, and then when you fold it open, you'll have created a round that should fit just about perfectly. Now that we've all learned a great trick, let's set these off to the side, and we can move on to sifting our dry ingredients. Here we've got flour, baking powder, and salt. I'm a little impatient when it comes to sifting, so ever since I was a kid, I've been using a whisk to push things through the strainer, and I like that all the different parts of the whisk help to push everything through really fast. Once our dry ingredients are sifted, we'll combine our wet ingredients. I'll crack four room temperature eggs into a bowl, along with some room temperature milk, neutral oil, and vanilla extract. Whisk this up until fully combined, and then set that to the side, and bring in your stand mixer. To the bowl of the stand mixer, we'll add our room temperature butter, as well as a paddle attachment, and begin to mix on four until it becomes lighter and a little fluffier. Should look about like this. Then we'll add in our sugar, and then mix again until everything's lighter in color. It's always a good idea to scrape down the edges of your bowl with a rubber spatula to make sure you pick everything up here. When this is done, it should look and feel like clumpy, extra wet sand. Next, a few spoonfuls at a time, I'll add my flour. We do this so the flour doesn't go all over the place as it mixes. This is what's called reverse creaming, and it's the secret to a professional cake texture. By coating the flour and butter before it hits any of those wet ingredients, we get a much more tender cake. Once fully combined, it should now feel like dry sand. As a final step, we'll add in the wet mixture, and here we don't mix for long. Give it a little scrape to make sure everything's come together, and mix until fully combined and no clumps remain. When baking, it's up to you how precise you want to be. For me, it really depends on the day, but today I'm going to use a scale. Because we're making a three-layer cake, it's especially important that I'm accurate here. I can already tell just by looking at this batter that the cake is going to be delicious. We'll bake these until they're beautiful golden brown on the middle rack of the oven, rotating them all partway through to make sure they're evenly cooked, and when they're done, they should look like this. You can test if they're done by using the old classic toothpick method. You don't want it to be completely clean. There should be a few small crumbs on there. Once they've cooled for 10 minutes, carefully remove them from the pans. Oh, that looks good. I love that leopard pattern on there. Then peel off that parchment paper, and set them on a wire rack lined baking sheet. They may still be a bit hot here, so if you want, you can instead flip them directly down onto a clean work surface and peel from there. This works just as well. We'll let these fully cool off to the side while we make our frosting. We start our frosting with lots and lots of butter. Get a high quality butter for this and make sure it's softened. Using the paddle attachment, we'll mix it on medium until it becomes very light and fluffy. Light and fluffy butter means a light and fluffy frosting. While still mixing, add your salt, vanilla extract, and a squeeze of lemon juice, then turn off your mixer, add in one scoop of sugar, maybe two if you're feeling dangerous, and slowly mix again. This is to keep the sugar from exploding all throughout your kitchen, and in between adding each scoop, I'll scrape down the edges of my bowl. Now, we just repeat that same process until we've added all our powdered sugar, going back and forth until everything is fully combined, hopefully with a very clean cutting board by the end. Continue mixing while you slowly pour in your heavy whipping cream, letting it go until it lightens in color and becomes beautifully fluffy. This is buttercream frosting, my favorite frosting in the entire world. To fill your piping bag, if you're even using a piping bag, find anything in your kitchen that can help it stand upright while you stuff it with frosting. If you're just making this cake at home and it doesn't have to look pretty, I'd skip the piping bag entirely. Once those cakes are cooled down, just lather it on there. I'm just going above and beyond compared to how I might make this for my family at home. They don't get all the fancy stuff, but you do. To layer our cake, we'll pipe a small amount of frosting onto the bottom of our cake stand, then place down this round, and after another little bit, we can layer down our first level of cake. Then, I'll pipe a nice even layer of buttercream all the way around the edge of my cake, and fill this in all the way through the middle with that same level of frosting. I'll spread this out using an offset spatula in a nice even and flat layer. You want this as flat as possible. And then, layer on that next cake. If you want this to be perfect, you should be refrigerating between every level. That'll give the frosting some time to set, and it'll give you a much cleaner cross-section at the end. I'm doing that here, but I'm just fast-forwarding things along so you don't have to wait. At this stage, I'll add on my third and final level of cake, and even if it looks like it has a few imperfections right now, we're about to cover that up with a lot more buttercream. It's time to do what's called our crumb coat. We do this to make sure none of the crumbs on the edge of our cake ever reach the outside of our frosting. You can see what I mean by all those crumbs getting trapped in the frosting. If we were to just spread all the frosting on right now, we'd end up getting crumbs on the outside, and that doesn't look good. Once we've let it refrigerate one more time, we can start to have some fun and really begin to make it look good. We'll add on a final layer of frosting before the sprinkles go on. Here, you need to get it as smooth and as perfect as possible. And once fully cooled, it should look like this. To add the sprinkles, I'm gonna get a little creative here. I'll carefully wrap the outside of our cake with this film here, then cut and pull it about an inch up off the cake. This will allow me to press the sprinkles into a nice even ring all the way around the bottom of my cake. But this is another great example of a step that if you're just making this cake for fun at home, you don't need to do it unless you really want to or care a lot about the looks. Once they've all been pressed in, I'll remove this plastic film, then get rid of all the mess. But we will save these sprinkles because we'll need them later. We're left with this. I'm gonna fast forward through the rest of our cake decoration because I know we all just want to see how it looks once I cut into it. But first, take a look at our beautiful vanilla cake. I saw this on the internet one time. Instead of going straight down with your knife and pushing all the crumbs through the frosting layers, push the knife from the outside to the inside like this, and hopefully we end up with a perfect slice of cake. This is the only fork I found in my drawer, so we're gonna have to make it work. Buttery, creamy frosting has that crumbly texture but becomes more chewy as you eat it. The reason I said it's the only vanilla cake recipe you'll ever need is because there's not a thing I'd change about it. Somebody watching must have a birthday today, so happy birthday.