Children’s Chocolate Birthday Cake with Milk Chocolate Frosting

This is a children’s birthday cake made with love. It was for my Godson’s birthday, so it should be called “Niko’s chocolate cake”! Pia and Niko are just a few weeks apart in age, and good friends, so she took great joy in helping me with every stage of the cake making, (especially with the candy).

The cake is light and tender with a medium strength of chocolate flavor (I didn’t want to go too rich with little kids) and the frosting is nice and creamy with a milk chocolate flavor.

We used huge amounts of candy to decorate the cake, and I will be honest- that was the best part!

(grocery store loot!!)

(good sorting exercise for small children!)

And if you could have seen the look on his face when he first saw it- it was totally worth it!!

Of course, if you don’t want to watch your kids bounce off the walls, (not that there isn’t enough sugar and caffeine in the cake itself!) you could certainly garnish the cake with nuts, or leave it plain. And by the way, please don’t wait for the next family birthday to make this cake. Without the pounds of candy, it is a perfect family dessert, which in fact, has been used as bribery for finishing dinner many, many times in my own family 😉

Children’s Chocolate Birthday Cake, serves 12

2 cups white sugar
1 cup oil
2 ½ cups cake flour
¾ cup cocoa powder
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 9” cake pans.

In the bowl of a standing mixer, combine the oil and the sugar, and beat until well combined.

In a separate bowl, combine the remaining dry ingredients.

Add the vanilla and eggs to the oil and sugar and beat to combine. Add the milk and beat until creamy and all the way combined.

Add the dry ingredients a little at a time, until all of the ingredients have been mixed into the batter. And it is smooth and chocolaty.

Evenly divide the batter between the two pans. Bake the cakes for about 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Let the cakes cool completely before frosting.

Milk Chocolate Frosting
2 sticks butter, soft
¼ cup cocoa powder
3 cups powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
4 Tbs Milk

Combine all of the ingredients in a bowl of a standing mixer and beat the frosting until it is light and fluffy.

Place one of the cake rounds on a cake plate or platter. (I usually put one dollop of frosting on the bottom to keep the cake from slipping.)

Frost the first layer generously.

Cover with candy if you want (we used gummy worms).

(This is the sugar hitting her blood stream, as well as the sheer joy of placing gummy worms on a chocolate cake. My mom may also have been in the background pretending that there were gummy worms crawling out of her nose? Who can be sure?)

Place the second cake round on the first, and proceed to use the rest of the frosting to frost the outside of both cake layers.

We then covered the entire outside of the cake with various candies. You could build patterns or just stick on there randomly. This is the best part for kids too so let them help!

Enjoy!

(Birthday Boy Niko)

(Niko’s Beautiful older sister Nina)

(Party Pony!)

(this Pony’s name was Romeo!)

(go coco go!! It was great until she mistook him for Henry, our St. Bernard and tried to take a fistful of mane with her ☺ Poor Romeo, coco is strong!)