Spice Cake

The sister cake to the previous post’s cherry cake is the spice cake. A velvety, mildly spicy spice cake iced with a vanilla buttercream including the same spices in the cake made for a harmonious blend of flavor and another cake well-worth making. I'll post the vanilla-spice buttercream in another post.

Spice Cake
1 stick butter, softened
1½ cups sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
4 egg whites
1¼ cup milk (I use half ½ and ½, half 1% milk)
2¼ cups cake flour
1 tblsp baking powder
1½ tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cloves
½ tsp ginger
pinch salt

Cream butter and sugar with a mixer until light and fluffy and then some – approximately 3 minutes. Add the vanilla extract, beating thoroughly. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg whites and the milk/½ and ½. In another separate bowl, combine all dry ingredients and mix well. Add 1/3 of the dry ingredients to the butter/sugar/juice mixture, and mix until incorporated. Add half of the wet ingredients and mix until incorporated, scraping the sides of the bowl as needed. Add half of the remaining dry ingredients and again mix until incorporated. Add the last half of the wet ingredients, mixing until incorporated. Lastly, add the remaining dry ingredients and mix until incorporated, and then mix for an extra few minutes at the end. Pour batter into cake pans prepared by spraying with nonstick cooking spray (or rubbed in butter) and coated with a light layer of cake flour. Bake in a preheated oven set to 350 degrees F until a toothpick in the center comes out clean, approximately 30-35 minutes for a 10 inch round.

As the pictures show, I made this cake a two-layer cake where each layer was made from two cake rounds. This cake recipe makes two 10 inch rounds. I doubled this recipe to make the cake as pictured. After the rounds cooled, I filled and iced them with a vanilla spice buttercream frosting before covering in fondant.