Vanilla layer cake with chocolate buttercream frosting

Let's start the week off with cake, shall we?  At least we'll kick it off by looking at cake.  That's really all I did because I made this vanilla layer cake with chocolate buttercream for my son's school fair this weekend.  

The cake is a double recipe of the Hummingbird Bakery's vanilla cupcakes.  Last time I made them, I was impressed by their flavor as well as moist and fluffy texture using a relatively small amount of butter (3 tablespoons for a dozen cupcakes).  It's an easy, tasty vanilla cake recipe that I was happy to whip up again.

I thought I'd pair the vanilla cake with an easy chocolate buttercream.  You can't go wrong covering all the bases with both chocolate and vanilla, right?  

Once again, making this cake reminded me that frosting/decorating layer cakes is not my thing.  I had some vague notion to pipe something on top of the cake but it just didn't work out.  I think it took me longer to figure out (more like "fix") the decoration (if you can call it that!) than to make and bake the cake layers.  In any case, I believe this is the time when we bring out words like "rustic" and "homemade" to describe the effort.  Regardless of how a cake ends up looking, there's still always something special and rewarding about creating a homemade one from scratch.

I had to sneak off a bit of the batter and make an extra cupcake (okay, two cupcakes) for my fellas.  That way, we get to taste test and make sure everything is alright.

Have a great week ahead!