Recipe: three buttercream layer cake

Moist almond and vanilla sponges layered with buttercream in the flavours: dark chocolate & cinnamon, raspberry, and almond, hazelnut & peanut praline.

I saw a cake on Rose Studio’s Instagram (rosestudioseoul) by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher last week and I couldn’t stop thinking about it and imagining how I could recreate it: a cube cake, with each side a different flavour of buttercream. Their cake boasted bold colours of red, blue and green among other colours, but I kept mine more muted with the flavours that I chose to use and by using natural products to dye the buttercream.

The dark chocolate & cinnamon layer is surprisingly different–the small touch of adding a little bit of cinnamon really transforms the flavour of the chocolate and brings out its spice and warmth. The raspberry layer is beautifully fruity and refreshing, and the praline layer is rich and nutty and brings a slight crunch and texture contrast. All three combined is a wonderful medley of flavours.

A will preface this recipe by saying that this isn’t the most straightforward cake to make, but that it isn’t difficult or too far from any other layer cake. The only real difference is that instead of making one buttercream, you make a base buttercream which is divided into 3 and each division gets a different flavour add in. It is slightly fiddly decorating each side with a different buttercream as far as any perfectionist traits are concerned, but I think the finished cake looks incredibly unique and intriguing and is worth spending a little bit of time over. I wanted to achieve the cube shape that I had taken inspiration from, but doing so meant I had a couple of leftover sponge squares (that still got eaten), so in order to minimise waste I have detailed the recipe below to produce a cake that is more cuboid than cube–less waste and feeds more, good things all round.

I recommend making the sponge and the praline the day before building the cake.