Black Vintage Heart Cake

A gorgeous, deep black vintage heart cake is the perfect way to celebrate endings – whether it’s an end of a decade and the start of another or perhaps a breakup or divorce. Whatever your somber celebration needs are, let there be cake!

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I recently made my first vintage heart cake for a breakup party. If you haven’t thrown yourself a breakup party before, I highly recommend. It’s fun and cathartic. The cake has 3 components:

• Black cocoa chocolate cake
• Black cocoa swiss meringue buttercream
• Fresh raspberries

How to make black cocoa chocolate cake

For the chocolate cake base, I use my favorite recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction, and I use black cocoa instead of regular cocoa.

Some notes on proportions:

• I made an approximately 6 inch cake. I say approximately, because I did not have 6 inch pans with me at my Airbnb. Instead, I poured the batter on a half sheet tray and cut out the heart shape.
• Filling the half sheet tray takes about 3/4 of the recipe
• If you are using round 6 inch pans, you would only need 1/2 the recipe, because there is less waste from trimmings

How to make black swiss meringue buttercream

Making black buttercream was quite the experience. I wanted the final cake to be a deep, rich black, not dark grey. It was a pain, but we got there.

I used the chocolate meringue buttercream recipe from Sugar Geek Show, with a few modifications:

• Salted butter instead of unsalted butter
• Skipped the 1/2 tsp of salt, since the butter was salted
• 90g of black cocoa powder instead of 113g of chocolate

In terms of proportions, I thought this was the perfect amount of buttercream to frost and decorate my 6 inch heart cake.

Don’t forget to set aside a small portion of uncolored buttercream for writing before you go crazy with the dye.

Tips to get a true black swiss meringue buttercream

• Use black cocoa powder in the buttercream base. It’s much easier than going from a plain white base
  • I’ve also heard that adding a little bit of red or dark blue to the base before adding black can also helped. Personally, I have not tried this.
• Use a high quality gel food dye, or a fat soluble powder dye
• After adding the dye, the buttercream will likely still look dark grey. Take about 1/4 of the buttercream, place it in a bowl, and microwave it. The color will darken significantly. Add the microwaved portion back into the bowl
  • I will be honest that I got so impatient with the process, I melted my entire bowl of icing over a bowl of steaming water. I then cooled it down and rewhipped it. It did help intensify the color quite a bit, but I wouldn’t recommend it since meringue-based buttercreams are fairly delicate. It worked for me, but I’m not 100% sure it would work all the time.
• Make the buttercream 1 – 2 days ahead of time. The color will deepen over time as the dye disperses throughout the buttercream.
• Serve at room temperature. As the icing warms from the fridge, the color will deepen

How to assemble and decorate a vintage heart cake

Here’s how I assembled my cake:

1. Cut out a heart template from a piece of paper. I do this by folding the paper in half, and cutting out half a heart so it’s symmetrical
2. Use the template to cut out 3 heart pieces from the larger sheet cake. You may need to trim your template so all 3 pieces fit. My 3rd piece wasn’t large enough, so I used scraps to fill in the lobes of the heart. It worked great.
3. Wrap the cake layer in plastic wrap, and place in the freezer. They are easier to work with when very cold.
4. To assemble the cake, I put one layer down on a turning cake stand. I pipe a layer of buttercream, fill with raspberries, then pipe a little more buttercream. The next layer goes on top. More buttercream and raspberries, then I finish with the final layer
   1. If you have a cobbled together layer, it should be the one that goes in the middle
5. Crumb coat the cake – Put a thin layer of buttercream all around. Place the cake in the freezer for minimum 20 minutes for the edges to set up
6. Evenly frost the crumb coated cake. I use an offset spatula for the top, and a flexible scraper to even out the sides
   1. The bottom and top of the sides don’t need to be perfect, as you’ll cover them with an icing border
7. Pipe your designs. I only had 2 piping tips, so here’s the design I landed on
   1. Large border on top and bottom of the cake using a French star piping tip
      1. To get a clean border, I pipe at a 45 degree angle, first pushing back a little before pulling forward to taper into a point
   2. Smaller borders of small circles using a small round piping tip
   3. Drapes along the side. I didn’t have a tiny round tip, so I just cut a very small hole in the plastic piping bag. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked.

These were the tools that I used:

• Flexible scraper
• Round spinning cake stand
• Piping bags
• Large French star piping tip
• Small round piping tip