Got to finally break out my neon green food coloring for this! # 355: Brat Layer Cake

I’m honestly terrible at keeping up with pop culture so when my sister-in-law’s friend requested a Brat cake, I lunged for the internet.

It was so fun to make a full-size cake! At the birthday girl’s request, it was a gluten-free chocolate cake with vanilla frosting. I did a few test runs of different frostings to see which would show the most vibrant color and Swiss meringue buttercream won in a landslide.

Sadly no slice shots since it had to stay pretty for a birthday party. Imagine three chocolate layers, filled with vanilla crème diplomat and outlined in highlighter green Swiss meringue buttercream.

One of the guests was lactose intolerant and planned to scrape off the filling and frosting, so I used lactose-free milk as a base for the buttermilk in the cake. It honestly worked exactly the same! The slightly sweeter taste of lactose-free milk (adding lactase in to milk breaks down the lactose into sugars that you can noticeably taste, cool huh?) was hidden by all the cocoa powder, espresso and vanilla.

The best part of this cake recipe is it’s a one-bowl-with-a-whisk situation. Oil instead of butter! Using a fat that’s liquid at room temperature not only makes mixing easier, but helps keep the baked cake moist for longer.

It’s only when I go to make a 3-layer cake that I remember I only have two 8-inch springform pans. Sigh. Someday I’ll actually buy another one to avoid waiting until the pans cool enough to evict a layer to bake the third one.

Pastry cream + whipped cream = yes please.

Swiss meringue buttercream is lighter and yummier than American buttercream (fight me). Cooking the egg whites and sugar over a bain-marie before whipping in the butter gives it a marshmallowy taste that distracts from how much butter is involved. Plus it holds its shape beautifully when piped with the added egg white protein structure.

Ok so this the craziest part: this is an insane amount of neon green food coloring and yet it’s still stubbornly pastel. Enter the magic fix!

Immersion blender to the rescue! It apparently removes some of the air from the frosting, making it a tiny bit denser but also way more vivid.

Buttercream fence to keep the crème diplomat from escaping.

Stacked.

Crumb coat done, now time to chill before the top layer.

Genius that I am, I forgot that if you put buttercream in the fridge it solidifies. I had the piping bags ready to go but they then had to hang out in the sun for a while before they were the right consistency again. Oops!

The spiral turned out so well I’m so happy! Someday I’ll get into all the fancy piping techniques Thida Bevington uses (she has one called hedgehog and I’m obsessed.)

Not trusting my letter spacing skills at all.

A lil shaky but I’ll take it!

Happy munching!