This three-layer chocolate cake is so moist and delicious with a smooth and creamy chocolate swiss meringue buttercream. It’s perfect for a birthday party with anyone who loves a good and classic chocolate cake.

Activating the cocoa powder:

To make this, recipe, you need to add boiling water to chocolate and cocoa powder. You might be wondering why I do this,  but I’ve noticed that when adding boiling water to chocolate, its flavor comes out, even more, causing the cake to be even richer and more chocolatey.

Why use oil:

You might have noticed why I’m using oil instead of butter in this recipe. This ingredient changes the entire method of making the cake. If we were using butter, we would, beat the butter and sugar, add the eggs then add the dry ingredients and milk alternating. But instead, we add all the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients at the same time. This method is a lot simpler and saves you a lot of time that you can use while decorating. Oil also tends to make cakes a lot lighter and moist. Butter tends to make cakes heavier perfect for pound cakes or other types of dense cakes. When making a chocolate cake, I love using either vegetable or Canola oil.

Buttermilk:

A good way to make a cake more tender is to use buttermilk. I know, buttermilk sounds weird but it actually tenderizes the gluten in the flour helping the cake be soft and tender. If you don’t have buttermilk at home, you can make it by adding 1-2 tbsp of lemon juice or vinegar to milk. It truly makes a great difference.

Decorating/Crumb Coat:

In case you don't know what I’m talking about, a crumb coat is a small layer of frosting people would put on the top and outside of their cake before completely frosting it. It helps seal all the remaining crumbs on the outside of the cake before they get all mixed up in your finishing layer of buttercream. It means that if you wanted to put a final layer of frosting on the cake there would not have any crumbs in it. In my case, I won’t be putting a final layer of frosting on the cake because I’m going for the naked cake rustic look. All this means that the crumb coat, I would do for an ordinary cake, is going to be the final layer on this cake.