Dark Chocolate Cake with Marshmallow Buttercream Frosting

This holiday I was tasked with making Christmas night dessert. The main guidance I got was “chocolate…but not too chocolate”. I floated a couple ideas by the family, and this one won. It also won at the dinner table!

Difficulty: easy
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Ingredients

Cake

1 ¾ cups flour
1 ¾ cups sugar
¾ cup dark cocoa powder
2 t baking soda
1 ½ t baking powder
1 t salt
2 eggs, brought to room temperature
¾ cup sour cream
½ cup vegetable oil
½ cup buttermilk
3 t vanilla
½ cup boiling water

Frosting

2 cups butter, brought to room temperature
2 ½ cups powdered sugar
2 t vanilla
1 16 oz container marshmallow fluff
Fancy sprinkles (optional)

Directions

Butter and flour two 9” cake pans and set them aside.

Put the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl and whisk until everything is distributed. Set aside.

In a separate bowl add the eggs, sour cream, vegetable oil, buttermilk and vanilla and mix until well combined.

Get your first bowl, pour your wet ingredients into your dry ones, add in the boiling water, and mix until well combined.

Pour your batter into your prepared pans and bake at 350 for about 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted inside comes out clean.

Once they’re done, move them to a wire rack to cool completely.

While the cakes are cooling you can move on to the marshmallow buttercream which is suuuper easy.

Take your butter and beat it until it’s nice and fluffy – figure about 5 minutes. Next, add in the powdered sugar. You’ll probably want to add this in phases so powdered sugar doesn’t fly all over everything. Once that’s in, mix in the vanilla. Finally, add in the marshmallow and gently fold that in until it’s well combined. That’s it!

Wait until your cakes are completely cooled before you frost them. If you want to be fancy (or festive), set aside some of the frosting – you’ll have plenty – and add some food coloring to it and pipe it onto the cakes after you’ve put on the base frosting. Or do what we did and save the frosting for another bake and just throw some colorful sprinkles on it. Either way, it will look like you worked really hard on it…even though you didn’t!