Baked Sunday Mornings: Holiday Spice Cake with Eggnog Buttercream

The perfect recipe came up on the Baked Sunday Mornings schedule just in time for our annual holiday open house: Holiday Spice Cake with Eggnog Buttercream. At last year's open house, the Stump de Nöel from Baked Explorations was a huge hit, so I hoped that the spice cake would rise to the challenge of everyone's expectations from last year. It didn't disappoint.

This recipe for this cake is very similar to that for the Whiteout Cake from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. You cream together butter and shortening, add sugar and vanilla, incorporate an egg, and then alternately add the dry ingredients (cake flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt) and ice water. Then you incorporate cinnamon, allspice, ginger (I used ground instead of fresh grated), and molasses, and fold in three egg whites that have been beaten with cream of tartar until soft peaks form. You divide the batter into three 8-inch pans and bake.

Once the cake layers have cooled, you assemble and frost the cake with a variation of the standard cooked Baked buttercream that has vanilla, dark rum, cinnamon, and nutmeg added (you are supposed to use one tablespoon of freshly grated nutmeg, but I used half a tablespoon of ground nutmeg instead). I can attest that as the recipe states, the frosted cake keeps beautifully under a cake dome at room temperature for several days.

When I made this cake for our holiday party, one of the cake layers broke when I unmolded it; I think that it was still a little too hot (whenever I bake a cake with three layers, I have to bake one of the layers separately because our oven isn't large enough to fit three cake pans on a single rack, and I never bake on more than one rack at the same time). Still, I served it as a two-layer cake and I had the advantage of a lot of leftover frosting for decorating! I made the cake again a few days later for an office party as a three-layer cake, and there was just enough frosting to go around. I lamented my lack of gold dragees to decorate the cake and used white luster pearls instead; only after the fact did it occur to me that I could have applied some gold luster dust to the white pearls to get the effect I was looking for.

This cake is incredibly delicious, and I'm not even a big fan of spice cake. The cake texture is remarkably delicate and tender, and the amount of spice is perfect -- warming and embracing, but not overpowering. The frosting is amazing; I'm pretty sensitive to rum (i.e., I can't stand it), but the flavor of the buttercream a perfect complement to the cake. This cake is fantastic, nothing short of festive holiday cheer in every bite.

Recipe: "Holiday Spice Cake with Eggnog Buttercream" from Baked Elements: Our 10 Favorite Ingredients, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito. Recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Posts:

• "Baked Sunday Mornings: Stump de Nöel," January 1, 2012.
• "White and Vanilla but Far from Ordinary: The Whiteout Cake," August 23, 2010.