Recipe for Chocolate Chip Yellow Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

I like to make cakes from scratch because they taste about a hundred times better, they don’t have any ingredients I can’t pronounce, and the ingredients for cake are things I always have around the house anyway. This week, while my car was in the shop, I felt at ease knowing that at least we had everything I needed to make my boy’s birthday cake. Making a cake from scratch is really not any harder than making one from a mix.

Birthday cake with candles all lit

The thing is, though, that I make very yummy cakes – I do not make pretty cakes! I promise you that this cake would have been just as un-pretty if it had been from a cake mix. One of these days I’m going to take a cake decorating class. When I was a little girl, I’d buy the Wilton yearbooks and look over them for hours, dreaming of making such beautiful creations. And here I am in my 40s and I haven’t done it yet.

Chocolate Chip Yellow Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

Cake

2½ cups all purpose flour
2½ teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter, softened
1¾ cup sugar
3 eggs (it’s better if they are room temperature)
1¼ cups milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1½ cups chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375°.

Grease and flour two round cake pans or a 9×13 pan.

In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt.

In your mixer bowl or another large bowl, beat the butter on high speed until fluffy. Add the sugar gradually, and then beat until very fluffy, about 2 minutes.  Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each one.

Stir the vanilla into the milk. Add the milk and the flour mixture alternately in thirds to the butter mixture (1/3 of the milk, then 1/3 of the flour, repeat twice).  Fold in the chocolate chips.

Spread the batter in the pans and bake for 20-30 minutes, or until a knife comes out clean when inserted near the middle of the cake. Let cool in the pans on a rack for 10 minutes, then remove the layers from the pan and let them cool completely on the rack before frosting.

Frosting

1 8-oz. package cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup butter, softened
2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 cup cocoa

Beat the cream cheese and the butter until fluffy. Whisk the sugar and the cocoa together and add gradually to the cream cheese mixture, beating until smooth and glossy.

Things not to do: I eyeballed how much batter was in each pan, and you can see that one layer is much higher than the other. And don’t manhandle your cakes. I did, and broke the top layer into several pieces. Then I tried to glue them back together with frosting, which did not work.

The cake and its many visual flaws (but it tasted fantastic)

What does work: Sprinkle the top liberally with chocolate chips, and the kids will think it’s beautiful anyway.

Linked to: Works for Me Wednesday