- Today, on "Stephanie's Recipe Journal," we are making checkerboard cake.

We are also going to learn how to elevate a cake mix from the grocery store, and we are gonna learn a little bit about icing as well as construction for this beautiful cake.

So grab a cup of coffee, pull up a seat, and come hang out with me.

(gentle music) So before we actually get started on our cake batter, let's preheat our oven to 350 degrees and prepare our cake pans.

I'm going to get this cake release.

I call it a magic cake release.

All it is, is some shortening, some vegetable oil, and flour.

I know, you guys are thinking heart attack, but we're just using a little bit, and it really helps to get that cake out nicely.

And after all, what's the point of making a cake if you can't get it out of the pan?

And then to get our round, what I'm gonna do is just cut out a piece of parchment paper.

Take a pencil and outline our pan, and then cut it out, last little bit.

It doesn't have to be perfectly round, just good enough to fit in your pan.

Just kind of smooth it down, and our pans are ready.

So now, we're going to make the cake batter.

And I am doctoring up a cake mix from a box.

And, oh my gosh, it is so delicious, you guys.

You're gonna love this.

So to the mixing ball is one box of, it's a yellow cake mix that I'm using.

And to that, I'm gonna add one cup of all purpose flour and one cup of granulated sugar.

And we also need just a little bit of salt.

Let's do a half teaspoon.

All right, let's give that a little mix.

And now, we're gonna add our wet ingredients.

So we have here, one and a third cups of whole milk, two tablespoons of vegetable oil, a cup of sour cream, a couple teaspoons of vanilla, and we need three eggs as well.

Now, we're just gonna mix this all together.

Mixer is gonna go for about two minutes until the batter is nice and smooth.

All right, I think it's looking good.

I'm actually going to measure out the batter into my two cake pans, just so we get as even as possible.

And I know from doing this before that I'm gonna need about 700 grams in each cake pan.

All right, so now we've finished the yellow part of our checkerboard cake.

And I'm just gonna put this aside, and we're going to make the chocolate cake next.

And the only thing different between the yellow cake mix-ins and the chocolate is, instead of a cup of flour, we're gonna do three fourths cup all-purpose flour, and we're gonna do a fourth of a cup of cocoa powder.

I always like to sift any cocoa powder before I put it into either a cake or even with icing, because it always seems like the cocoa powder has little lumps.

This looks good.

Give it a good mix.

Make sure everything's incorporated and pour it in our pans.

So we have our two yellow cake layers.

We have our two chocolate cake layers for our checkerboard cake that are ready to go into the oven for heated 350, for about 30 minutes.

(gentle music) While our cakes are baking, it's a great time to get started on our chocolate buttercream icing.

We're going to start this buttercream icing with some chocolate ganache.

You're gonna love this recipe.

We need a half a cup of cream.

We just want our cream warm enough so that the chocolate melts.

We don't wanna bring it to a boil.

While that is getting up to a simmer, I'm gonna chop up four ounces of dark chocolate.

There we go.

Okay.

See, it's boiling around the sides here.

Just gonna take that off.

Add our chocolate, and just stir, stir, stir until the chocolate gets all nice and melted and incorporated.

Mm, it smells wonderful, you guys.

(gentle music) So our ganache has cooled down, and now we're gonna start mixing the rest of our chocolate buttercream ingredients.

And I have five sticks of butter.

I know, some of you are probably like, aghast right now, but it's a big cake.

And so we need quite a bit of icing to get it, not only constructed, but then make it pretty.

The butter's been out for a while, you really want it at room temperature.

You don't want it like, melty-melty, but you do want it soft enough now that you can get your mixer to kind of get a head start on blending it together.

So I'm just gonna turn the mixer on.

We're just gonna get this butter kind of all mushed up and blended.

And while that's getting kind of creamy, what I have here is, about a half a cup of cocoa powder that I sifted.

And then here, again, forgive me, you guys, but because we're decorating the cake in a way that I wanna make it into swirls, I've got quite a lot of confectioners' sugar, which is gonna make it a little on the sweet side, but it's going to help me get that construction that I need for the swirls on my cake.

All right, so it looks like our butter now is nice and creamy together.

I used to know someone who never could remember to take her butter out of the refrigerator and so she would just, she'd stick it in the mixer, just right out the fridge.

And oh my God, she would just let the mixer go on, I mean, it would run for maybe a half an hour before it finally got to this stage.

I was like, girlfriend, just remember to take your butter out of your refrigerator.

All right, so to this now, I am going to add all of our cocoa powder, and I'm just gonna add a pinch of salt.

It seems counterintuitive, but with all of this confectioners' sugar in there, we need the salt to kind of offset some of that sweetness.

I have added all of this sugar in it one time before, and as you can imagine then, I'd have cocoa powder and I'd have confectioners' sugar all over the place.

So I'm going to try and do this a little on the neater side for you guys and only add half of it at a time.

And then I'm also going to cover it.

You'll see, I'm gonna cover it with a towel.

And hopefully, I'll still get sugar all over the place, but hopefully, it won't be quite as messy.

We'll see.

Here we go.

Fingers crossed.

So I'm being brave, but I'm gonna take my towel off.

Yay!

Okay, let's stop it.

Let's add the rest of our sugar.

And this is really going to be the messy part.

And I'm not forgetting about our ganache, but we're gonna add that at the very end.

But listen, hear how it's kind of slowing down.

I haven't changed the speed of the mixer, but it feels like it's working a little harder right now or it sounds that way.

And so I am going to be brave and lift up the towel now.

Yay!

And then I'm just gonna turn this up a little bit.

All right.

Next up goes, our chocolate ganache.

And you can see that if your ganache were still like, hot or even warm to the touch, then it would just melt all of your buttercream, which would not make for a really good icing.

This is just really gonna make this buttercream so easy to work with, but also so chocolatey and delicious.

(gentle music) Look at how beautiful and creamy this turned out.

It smells wonderful.

So let's take a few minutes though and talk about all of the different types of icings that are out there.

This is American buttercream.

It just is straight, butter whipped with some confectioners' sugar and some flavoring.

So in this case, chocolate was our flavoring, then we just added that little bit of ganache.

But it is the simplest icing to make.

It's great for decorating, using it to decorate because you can kind of control the consistency of it.

You can make it stiffer if you want, by adding more confectioners' sugar, or you can make it creamier by adding a little bit of milk or some cream, whatever you like.

But that is American.

But you know, there are also some wonderful meringue buttercream.

There's Swiss meringue buttercream, Italian, there's even a German one.

And the differences are in really the preparation.

So for Swiss buttercream, for one, you actually take egg whites, you're gonna melt the granulated sugar into the egg whites while you're whipping it.

You get that all then whipped up on a mixer.

It looks like- And it is delicious meringue.

And then you add the butter to that and get that all whipped up, add your flavoring, some little vanilla or maybe a little almond extract.

It is delicious too.

And it's really creamy.

It's really smooth.

It's a very popular buttercream.

Italian buttercream uses the same ingredients but actually incorporates the egg whites and the sugar a little bit differently into the meringue.

So there's a whole variety out there, and honestly, just kind of scope 'em out, see what you like, see what might be easiest for you to make, and certainly, what might be the most delicious.

But I think our cakes are now ready to come out of the oven, so I'm gonna get them out.

We're gonna let them cool.

And while that's happening, I'm gonna show you how to make a darling fondant rose.

I have here, two different colors of fondant, a little kind of peachy pink color that I made, and a nice little green for the leaf or leaves around the rose itself.

I make my own marshmallow fondant.

It's really pretty easy.

I just like the taste of it better, but you can get fondant in the store.

They're in the grocery stores, you can get it online or you can opt not to do it at all.

But I just love a little bit of embellishment on top of my cake.

And it's really pretty easy.

I'm just going to roll out as thin as possible, but yet still be able to kind of work with it.

And this is getting a little sticky.

So I have here, this is just a little bit of confectioners' sugar.

So here, let's roll it out a little bit thinner.

And I have here a little, this is actually a cutter that is specific for cutting out fondant and making little roses.

But if you don't have one, all you need to do is cut out circles.

So here, we have our cutout.

And all I'm gonna do is, fold it in half.

And now I'm just gonna take one end and start to roll it up fairly, tightly.

But I'm also rolling at a little bit of an angle.

You can see here how it's starting to roll up.

So here, I kept it pretty straight and this is what it looks like until you just start to pull the pedals out.

And I'm just pinching the bottom to give it more of an actual row shape, but you can see that by pinching the bottom, I'm pulling those outer pedals out.

And then you can just play around with it until it looks like a whatever type of rose you might like it to do.

And then you see, we've got this little pointy part at the end here.

You can keep it on because then that's what could anchor it into the cake.

Or if you just wanna like place it on top of your icing, just cut it off, and you're golden.

And we're gonna make a couple leaves that we're gonna put on the edge of our rose.

I'm using a mold that has little veins in it, so it looks so realistic.

And then we're just going to press fondant into our leaf design here.

And it comes out really easy, but honest to goodness, look at that.

It looks like a really beautiful, delicate little leaf.

And then all we're going to do to that is just attach it to our rose.

There's our second leaf, and we're just kind of gonna angle it a little bit lower than the other one.

And there we have it, you guys.

A beautiful little fondant leaf that we're gonna set aside because this will be our little crowning glory on our checkerboard cake.

(gentle music) Okay, everyone, here comes the fun part, getting our cake layers ready and assembling our checkerboard cake.

So the first thing I'm gonna do is, I want my cakes to be as flat and equal in layers as possible.

So you know, every cake, for the most part has a little dome on it.

We're gonna just take that dome off.

And don't be afraid here, because I mean, we really want this to be flat.

And it's not that you're wasting the cake that is your treat, right?

After you get them off.

But it feels like, oh my gosh, I'm taking so much off.

And all I'm doing here is taking my serrated knife and just going around the edge here.

I've got a pedestal, which makes it easier to kind of keep moving it around.

But if you don't, it's just take your knife and you know, just go all the way around like that.

But here we have that layer, and woo!

Look.

And we just have a nice flat surface to work from.

I'm gonna do it with my other yellow layer.

And because we're making this checkerboard design and we want the checkerboard to be as even as possible, 'cause you'll look at this chocolate layer and you'll think, well, that's pretty darn flat, and it is.

And under normal circumstances, I would say, hey, we're golden, I'm not gonna cut anything off.

But I want it to be as close in height as my yellow.

And you can see that there's a little bit of a difference there.

So I'm just gonna make a little mark so I know about where to begin.

And move our yellow layer off.

Bring us back to center here, and let me find my little mark, which was right there.

And I'm just gonna do the same thing with the chocolate.

Only I'm not taking off like that little mound layer, but I'm just evening things up.

What we're going to do is cut our cake into three sections.

Grab whatever you have.

If you have a bowl that is the size you want, this is just a huge like biscuit cutter that I have here, but it's about five inches across, which gives me the ring size that I want.

So all I'm gonna do here is line it up as best we can.

Just kind of eyeball it.

Once you get it to where you think you're pretty even on all sides, don't go all the way through, just make enough of an indent that you can kind of see your pattern around there.

And then take a parring knife and just go all the way through.

So now, I'm just going to lift that ring off, set it aside.

And now we want our smaller ring.

And again, I just have a biscuit cutter here.

It's about maybe an inch and a half, maybe a little bit bigger than that.

And I'm just gonna center it up again as best I can and make our indent.

So I'm just gonna go in, I made my mark in the chocolate.

Sometimes it's hard to see where you made your mark, so find where your indent was and then cut around the inside of the cake, and then push that little baby section out and set it aside.

Let's do that again with the chocolate, and then we'll move on to our yellow layers.

I know this seems like, oh, you're probably thinking, oh my gosh, really?

But it's so worth, the finished look.

And it's really just some construction.

It's not that the technique is difficult or anything like that.

I'm just gonna grab a cake board that I have, but whatever you have that's flat to give yourself some foundation to your cake.

And this is gonna be a four layer cake, so it doesn't matter if you start with yellow or chocolate, whichever you prefer.

I'm gonna put a chocolate layer down first, and then I'm going to take a middle section of my yellow and fit it right in there.

And then I'm gonna take one of the little baby chocolates and put that in there like that.

Let's give it a layer of icing to kind of cement it all in.

And this doesn't have to be perfect by any stretch, we're just trying to get a layer in, that's gonna help glue, so to speak our sections in and get our next layer on top.

And we're just gonna keep repeating this until we get our cake totally constructed here.

So we started with a chocolate outer, and so now, we are putting a yellow outer ring on.

And we're gonna take a center chocolate and a little baby yellow.

So we're just gonna continue this pattern until it's fully constructed and then we'll be ready to give its nice little rose at icing.

(gentle music) All right, now, we get to decorate using a rosette design on the outer part of our cake.

Now, some of you might be looking at this and saying, it looks pretty gosh darn good as is, and you were right.

It will be delicious.

And so if you're kind of icing a verse, by all means just give it one little-thin coat and you'll be golden.

But I am of the belief that more is more, and that's never a bad thing.

So we're doing the rosette design.

I've got here on my piping bag, just an open star tip.

You can decide what size you'd like.

The larger the open star, obviously, the larger your rosettes are going to be.

So starting in the center here, we're just gonna start to squeeze our bag and go around.

And then you stop pushing on your bag and lift up.

Let's do that again.

Start pushing, giving pressure on your bag, go around, stop pushing, and lift up.

Push, go circular, stop pushing, lift up.

I'm just gonna continue to do that all around the cake, tops, and sides.

And you wanna make sure that you actually have contact with the icing, get a good and connected, otherwise, your rosettes are gonna fall off the side.

But I'm using that same process of pushing, going circular, stopping the pressure, and releasing.

So we're almost there.

We've got some areas there that we don't have rosettes, and we can do one of two things.

We can either make a tiny little rosette to fill in the gap or like here, we can just make little stars.

And the way we make stars with our open star tip is just press down and release, press down and release, press down and release.

And so they just make little stars.

And I'm pretty happy with how that is looking.

Our final touch now, our fondant rose that we made, we are just going to place it right in the center like that.

And voila, look at that.

I think, she is very beautiful.

Honestly, this cake is so beautiful, you don't need a lot of extras to put it on your table.

But the one thing I would recommend is because it's pretty tall, I would choose a lower pedestal.

So that, I mean, number one, it shows off the beauty of the cake itself, but it keeps it all in a better perspective, I think, and people then can see the cake itself.

So now, for the moment we've all been waiting for, let's do the big reveal.

I'm gonna slice it open.

And just so you know, I mean, I chose a fairly large plate, because this is gonna be a big slice.

I don't want any of it hanging off the side.

But again, too, for serving purposes, just keep that in mind that the size of the slice is gonna be pretty big.

Oh my gosh, look at how this design turned out.

I really do hope you guys enjoyed spending some time with me today.

We learned a little bit about icing and structuring a checkerboard cake.

And I hope to see you again soon on another episode of "Stephanie's Recipe Journal."

(gentle music)