Yellow Cake with Dark Chocolate Buttercream Frosting: Round 1

As previously mentioned, the perfect frosting has already been discovered, so unless otherwise mentioned it's safe to assume that the base of the frosting will the the Italian Meringue Butter Cream from Cake Love with experimentations to the flavorings.

That being said, this most recent adventure involved yellow cake and dark chocolate frosting. Future posts will have better photo depictions, but since I didn't get the idea for the blog until after I had baked and given away these bad boys, this one picture will have to suffice!

Analysis of the Cake
The cake recipe was the "Yellow Buttermilk Cupcakes" recipe from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes. Now, I already have kind of a beef with this cookbook (mainly that it touts 175 recipes for cupcakes when half of them are really just muffins and also that it appears to focus on the flashy instead of the quality) but the recipe seemed pretty simple and involved buttermilk, something I've found to be an indicator of a good cake recipe. But, overall I felt that the cake was rather bland and needed more of a robust "yellow cake" hurrah and was easily overpowered by the fantastic frosting.

The Yays

• Baked nicely, a little golden brown on the edges just like you'd want
• Held it's shape well when unwrapped, not too crumbly (there's nothing worse than either of those things)
• The unbaked batter was fantastic
• Good amount of sweetness

The Nays

• A little bit on the drier side. This recipe used cake flour and all-purpose flour which I'm highly skeptical of because some of the best cakes I've baked were from recipes that used all-purpose flour. I think somehow the gluten content of the conflicting flours was the culprit
• Underwhelming taste, could have had more oomph

Overall Impression: Meh
I just have a gut feeling a better recipe exists out there. It's not horrible, but it definitely does not qualify for "ohmuhlord" status

Analysis of the Frosting
For the frosting I took the chocolate additions from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes recipe for Dark Chocolate frosting and added them to the Italian Meringue base. Using a combination of cocoa powder in boiling water and melted semi-sweet chocolate chips the result was fantastical. The frosting retained all of the wonderful things about the Italian Meringue but had a nice rich dark chocolate finish.

Overall Impression: Ohmuhlord
This one is a definite winner and will be recorded in my personal cookbook I am building.

In summary, there still exists a quest for a better yellow cake and my suspicions of Martha Stewart's focus on the flash rather than a good tasting product were partially confirmed.