Neapolitan Cake

As many of you may know, Tuesday was the royal baby Prince George's first birthday. Naturally, I had to make him a birthday cake! I didn't find this recipe on Pinterest or anything, but I'm proud to say that I crafted this strange beautiful idea all on my own. I decided on the Neapolitan because it has three parts, just like the royal family, and each part of the cake is symbolic of one of the majesties. The vanilla layer of the cake is for Prince George his royal babiness because of his purity and childly innocence. The strawberry is obviously her royal highness Kate because it's pretty and pink and sweet. And finally, Prince William is the chocolate cake layer, which was on the bottom, because he's like the foundation of their beautiful perfect royal family and the reason everyone else can be royal, too. Plus he's rich and yummy.

Anyway, that was sort of vomit-inducing, but it pleases me regardless. It's worth noting that I made the full recipes of both these cakes, which normally make 2 layers, but I used the remaining batter for cupcakes. The big cake was for work and the cupcakes were for my friends. I tried to make them into marble cupcakes, but it was a pretty huge failure. The chocolate batter is really runny and thin, but the vanilla batter is pretty thick, so the resulting product was kind of odd. Plus I sort of burnt half of them, but that's a different matter. Regardless, I recommend keeping them separate. If you don't want to make cupcakes, cut the recipes in half!

Neapolitan Cake- from several sources to be noted
Ingredients
Vanilla Cake- courtesy of the Cake Boss
2 cups of sugar
4 eggs
2½ cups of flour

1 cup of milk

¾ cup of vegetable oil

2¼ teaspoons of baking powder

1 teaspoon of vanilla

Chocolate Cake- from Hershey
2 cups of sugar

1¾ cups of flour
¾ cup of cocoa powder
1½ teaspoons of baking powder
1½ teaspoons of baking soda
1 teaspoon of salt
2 eggs
1 cup of milk
½ cup of vegetable oil
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
1 cup of hot/boiling water

Strawberry Frosting-Gutie original

2 sticks of butter, room temperature

8 cups of powdered sugar

2 teaspoons of vanilla

6 tablespoons of milk

⅓ cup of strawberry preserves

1 teaspoon of strawberry extract (optional, I just have some lying around)

Directions

Start by preheating to 350 and lining the bottoms of 2 9-inch cake pans with cut parchment paper, then greasing the pan. Both batters are pretty straight forward. I made one in the stand mixer and another in a mixing bowl with a handheld mixer. So for the vanilla, mix up the sugar and eggs until they thicken a bit, then just add everything else, but don't overbeat it. Pour that into the pan and then start on chocolate. Take all those dry ingredients (sugar, flour, cocoa powder, BP, BS, salt) and put them in the bowl. Then throw in the eggs, milk, oil, and vanilla. Mix it all up until it's smooth. Quick pro-tip: when recipes call for boiling water, I usually just put it in the microwave for like a minute or so depending on the quantity, but I like to keep it simple. So lastly pour the water in super carefully so you don't splash yourself. That's done, so pour it into the pan. Both batters happen to bake for 30 minutes, so that's like perfectly easy. Let them cool for a little while in the pans, then when you can touch them without burning yourself, turn them out onto a cooling rack or plates to come the whole way to room temperature.

 

Once they're almost cool, start the frosting. The base is just my standard buttercream, so cream the butter, add vanilla, then add sugar and milk back and forth until frosting happens. I recommend being a little stingy on the milk at first, maybe only 4 tablespoons. Then after you add the preserves and extract, check on the consistency and add more milk if you need to. This will depend on what kind of preserves you use, but mine was pretty thin and my frosting ended up a bit softer than I wanted it to be, but it still tasted good. Assembly time: put your first layer down on the serving dish. I used the chocolate first, for the metaphor. Then rather than putting frosting in between the layers I used extra preserves, which was pretty yummy. Put your top layer on, and frost it. Decorate it however you want, but I thought the strawberries were pretty and yummy!

Reviews

I was a bit wary with the vanilla cake. The vanilla batter I usually use doesn't really translate well to a big cake as opposed to a cupcake. It's too soft and crumbly and fell apart when I tried to manipulate it. So I needed a new one, for this, and while the Cake Boss is a name I trust, the recipe looked a little odd. There were fewer ingredients than I'm used to, particularly in the dry ingredients. But I went for it and I shouldn't have been worried. The texture was perfect, it was firm, but still moist. It stood up really well to being moved around, and it tasted good. I liked the cake altogether, but I did get a couple comments that the frosting was too sweet, which I understand. The preserves were pretty sweet on their own, plus 8 cups of powdered sugar, it's just not some people's thing. I didn't mind it, but it's just personal preference. Anyway, happy birthday Georgy!