Neapolitan Cake Recipe
Chocolate cake, strawberry cake, and vanilla cake with all the trimmings... perfect Neapolitan cake
Print
Pin
Servings: 15 Slices
Ingredients
Cake Ingredients
- 400 g unsalted butter
- 400 g caster sugar
- 8 medium eggs
- 400 g self raising flour
- 100 g dark chocolate (melted)
- 50 g strawberry coulis (or any coulis)
- pink food colouring
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
Buttercream Ingredients
- 400 g unsalted butter (room temp)
- 800 g icing sugar
- 75 g melted chocolate
- 40 g strawberry coulis
- pink food colouring
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
Decoration
- fresh strawberries
- pieces of chocolate
Instructions
For the Cake
- Preheat your oven to 180ºc/160ºc fan, and line three 8"/20cm round cake tins with parchment paper. Leave to the side for now.
- In a bowl/stand mixer, add your butter and sugar, and beat until fluffy.
- Add in the eggs and flour, and beat again. Split the mixture into three bowls. It will be about 525g in each bowl to make sure its even.
- Add some cooled melted chocolate to one, and mix. Add the coulis and pink food colouring to the other, and mix. And add the vanilla to the final one and mix.
- Pour each mix into its own tin, and bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes, or until its baked. A skewer should come out clean!
For the Buttercream
- Beat the unsalted butter (please don't use anything else other than actual unsalted butter) in a bowl until its all smooth. Room temperature butter is best.
- Add in the icing sugar and beat again. If the butter was really supple and smooth before adding, this icing sugar should go in easily.
- Split the mixture between three bowls, and add the cooled melted chocolate to one, the coulis and pink food colouring to another, and the vanilla to the final and beat again until smooth
For the Decoration
- Put each buttercream into a bag. Do this in whatever order you like, but I did my chocolate layer, and then my chocolate buttercream, strawberry layer and then my strawberry buttercream, my vanilla layer, and then the vanilla buttercream on top
- With each layer, I smoothed out an even layer of each flavour.
- Apply a thin crumb coat in plain vanilla buttercream.
- Chill in the fridge for 30-45 minutes
- Apply Buttercream in Bands using a piping bag, enough for each layer (be careful to follow the line of each cake layer.
- Using a clean metal scraper, rotate the cake stand creating a clean buttercream finish with clear lines.
- In order pipe blobs of buttercream around the top edge of the cake (Chocolate, Strawberry, Vanilla)
- Decorate with fresh strawberries, pieces of chocolate, or anything you like!
Notes
- This recipe will last for 3 days once made
- I used pink food colouring to get a lovely pink colour, and some strawberry coulis. You can use any red berry coulis if you don't want to make it yourself! It's very important to use GOOD QUALITY food colouring, and not cheap supermarket stuff.
- I used dark chocolate because its a better flavour once baked in comparison to milk chocolate. It also gets the colour of the sponge to be darker and look more chocolate like.
- You can make a smaller version (two layer) if you like, but obviously you might have to make the sponges swirled in colour if there are only two. Use two thirds of the ingredients and:
- 300g unsalted butter
- 300g caster sugar
- 6 medium eggs
- 300g self raising flour
- 75g melted chocolate
- 40g coulis
- To create the perfect smooth iced finish you will need:
- Fully stacked and chilled three-tier cake (chocolate bottom, strawberry middle, vanilla top)
- Tall cake scraper (metal preferred)
- Offset spatula
- Piping bags (one per colour)
- Turntable
- Palette knife
- Plenty of fridge space