Bored of chocolate or looking for the one true cake? Check out this Vanilla cake recipe and the world will never be the same!

Vanilla cakes can be wide and vary but every one of them share one unique trait. They are all flavored with vanilla.

Apart from that, there aren’t any hard fast rules how they are supposed to look like or what structures we are supposed to follow, nor the exact ingredients, we should be employing, making the cake.

Most cakes, that have been created by professionals, have very strict recipes and structures so everybody knows what we need to put in and what order is to make Dobos torte, Black forest cake or Gerbaud cake.

These recipes tolerate very little deviance from the original form or flavor. We may decrease the amount of sweetener we use or apply a slightly different decoration, but we can’t get very creative when making them.

Not Vanilla cakes though. Similarly to chocolate cakes where as long as we put enough chocolate in them, they will be chocolate cakes, as long as we stuff enough vanilla in and around the cake, we stay within the boundaries of vanilla cakes and we are good to present our creation as such.

Vanilla originally made from the orchid Vanilla but nowadays about 95% of vanilla flavored food made with man-made synthetic vanilla to save costs. Luckily, if we are willing to pay the price, we can still get our hands on original vanilla beans and make our own vanilla extract or straightway use it in our recipes.

Vanilla on its own will do very little to excite our taste buds since it doesn’t have a flavor but only a smell which is recorded by our nose through the passageway between out mouth and nose. Hence most vanilla cakes are pumped up with a ton of sweetener in and out, so we don’t just smell good about it through our nose but feel good about it through our taste buds.

If we have been off sugar for a while, the amount of sweetener can be drastically reduced (a concept that sugar free chocolate and dessert manufacturers don’t seem to grasp) and our vanilla cake will still be enjoyable.

The cake itself can be made with various methods from using an airy plain sponge cake to a denser pound cake or something in between, but much depends on how long we plan to keep our vanilla cake.

Sponge cakes aren’t really happy about days in the fridge while buttery pastries are much more forgiving and can be refreshed in the microwave oven in a couple of seconds.

Unfortunately, frostings aren’t really big fan of quick microwave hacks, and few can withstand more than a couple of seconds go around in the heat. The buttery ones though taste best when soft and light which happens at room temperature so keep that in mind when storing them in the fridge.

The fastest and probably easiest, yet far from tastiest frosting is, the plain sweetened buttercream. If we are after some extra lightness or struggle to make Swiss buttercream without sugar then our best bet will be on the German buttercream which is basically custard whipped buttercream with all the silky, fluffy creaminess the world can offer.

At the end it doesn’t matter which batter or frosting we choose, as long as there is enough vanilla and sweetener in our cake, it won’t be far from the truth.

Ingredients

Cake

3 medium / 150g Eggs
½ teaspoon / 3g Salt
10 tablespoons / 150g Butter (melted)
2 tablespoons / 30g Honey or sweetener of choice to taste
1½ teaspoon / 7.5ml Vanilla
1 cup / 240ml Buttermilk or Whole milk
2½ cups / 300g Flour
1½ teaspoon / 4g Baking powder

German buttercream

2 cups / 500ml Milk
2 medium / 50g Egg yolks
6 tablespoons / 45g Corn starch
1 cup / 200g Butter
Sweetener of choice to taste

Kitchen utensils

Ø6½” / Ø16.5cm Spring baking form

How to make Vanilla cake

Cake

Whisk eggs until light yellow.
Keep on whisking and incorporate salt, melted butter, honey or sweetener of choice then vanilla and buttermilk.
Whisk in flour. If we have an electric mixer, we can save time by throwing everything together and let the machine do the hard work but otherwise follow the steps to easily incorporate all the ingredients.
If buttermilk is used, now it is the time to add the baking powder and whisk it in as fast as we can. Adding baking powder earlier will result reaction of the baking powder with the acid of the buttermilk which would ruin the fluffiness of our cake.
Quickly pour the batter into the baking form.
Place the Vanilla cake into the middle rack of 350°F / 180°C preheated oven until the inner temperature of the cake reaches 208°F / 98°C. Which should happen when golden brown spots start to appear on top in 30 – 40 minutes.

German buttercream

For more detailed instructions check out: Buttercream Frosting Recipe

Warm the milk up in a pot on medium heat until it starts to bubble gently.
In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks for about a minute, until light yellow and increased in volume. Whisk in the cornstarch, vanilla extract, sweetener and gradually about ½ cup of the hot milk.
Slowly pour all of the egg yolk mixture into the scalding milk while stirring vigorously until the mixture seems completely dissolved. Keep warm and continuously stir until the custard thickens.
While letting the custard cool to room temperature cream the butter. Whisk the creamed butter and cooled custard together.

Assembly

Cut the cake up into 3 or any other desired number of layers and remove the uneven top if necessary.
With 3 layers, spread ¼th of the cream evenly onto each layer of the cake.
Keep the last ¼th of the cream for the outer layer and optional decoration for the top.
Put vanilla cake into the fridge for the frosting to set which will allow us to slice the cake nicely.