This weekend was Alisa's birthday! We have developed a little tradition of surprising each other with different cakes every year. Last year I made Alton Brown's peanut butter pie and some "jelly" macarons. Alisa once made me a giant Samoa Caramel deLite cake. This year I had an idea to do a "dirty chai" (chai with a shot of espresso) cake.
I used King Arthur Flour's chai-spiced pound cake recipe for the cake. It's supposed to be baked in a bunt pan, but you can swap out for a different pan based on the volume. Since the recipe calls for a 9 or 10 cup bundt pan, two 8 inch rounds work great. Here's a nice reference for pan size volume since the math for this is a little annoying in Imperial units:
π · 4"² · 1.5" = 75.39 in³
75.39 in³ · 0.55 in³/fl oz = 137 fl oz
137 fl oz ÷ 8 fl oz/cup = ~5 cups
To get some coffee flavor in there, I did a coffee-infused German buttercream. I just added 3-4 tablespoons of coffee beans along with the vanilla beans to infuse the custard. I also made a little coffee syrup by reducing some leftover coffee mixed with a bit of sugar. I thought it could work as a soak for the cake layers or that I might mix it into the buttercream at the end, but I ended up keeping it separate, since it was a little bitter and I thought the girls might not like it.
One of the rounds stuck to the pan (yes, I will use parchment next time), so there was a pretty thick layer of frosting in the middle to even things out. This is pretty much the only time of the year I ever make a cake, so I'm a pretty inexperienced cake froster. I gave it a "crumb coat" and then I guess I gave it a thicker crumb coat, since it still had crumbs peeking through everywhere.
The cake was a hit though—the spice in the cake was flavorful without ending up tasting like a ginger cake or too much like cardamom, and the buttercream had a nice mellow coffee flavor. One person mentioned the frosting tasted like straight butter, so you might want to consider adding more coffee flavor using espresso powder or a coffee liqueur. Or skip the icing all together and pour some Kahlua over the original bundt cake version!
Chai-spiced cake with giant layer of frosting