Ring in the next decade with a decadent New Year’s Eve blackout cake filled with glittery sprinkles and a shimmering gold fault line.
If you didn’t know, I really love sprinkles and my favorite place to purchase them is through Fancy Sprinkles. Their New Year collection caught my eye and I immediately purchased the 2020 & Metallic Rainbow Dragee sets which inspired this cake.
Originally, I intended to make a drip cake, similar to others I’ve made this year because they’re just SO fun to make but decided at the last moment (similar to how I make all my baking decisions…) to do something different and learn a new technique.
Check out the pinata cake I made last year to celebrate 2019!
I’ve been admiring fault line cakes on Instagram for a while now and I loved their 3D look with sprinkles, cookies, or an intricate design embedded as a ‘layer’ of the cake so after researching the process, I found it wasn’t as complicated as I originally thought and decided to give it a go for my New Year’s Eve cake.
The Chocolate Cake
I used this tutorial for the fault line process and my own chocolate cake and chocolate buttercream recipes (below) to make and frost the actual New Year cake. I love love love this chocolate cake recipe. It’s a no-fail recipe that bakes beautifully every time. It’s moist and perfectly chocolatey. I’ve been making it for years. And I think there’s no better way to celebrate a new decade than with chocolate!
Black Chocolate Buttercream
My chocolate buttercream recipe is a go-to as well, one that I keep in my baking arsenal. It’s a combination of both buttercream and vegetable shortening which I find holds up better than straight butter-only frosting. To color the frosting black, I just added a couple of teaspoons of black food coloring at the very ended and gave it a good whip in the mixer. The key to making black frosting is to always use chocolate as your base. Attempting to color vanilla or light-colored frosting black will simply result in a metallic, gray color.
Adding the Sprinkles
When it came time to add the sprinkles onto my New Year cake, I first started by slowly placing each individual sprinkle on with my hands and tweezers. After about 10 minutes, I found the process to be way too tedious and resorted to my standard method (which is a bit messier but much quicker, even with cleanup time!) and put a bunch of sprinkles in my palm, and carefully pressed them into the frosting while rolling my hand upwards on the cake.
Gold Fault Line
To create the gold fault line for my New Year’s Eve cake, I made an edible paint using a 1/2 teaspoon of gold luster dust and about 2 teaspoons of vodka and mixed them together until smooth. I then used a fine pastry brush to paint on the lines. Initially, I painted a rough fault line but later came back and smoothed it out, liking the appearance of a neater gold trim better.
If you make my New Year’s Eve cake, please let me know how it turns out! It’s such a fun cake and I love the Fancy Sprinkles on it. I’m almost tempted to make a second just to stare at in my kitchen on New Year’s Eve!
Happy New Year, Friends!
- Three 6-inch chocolate cakes, recipe below
- 6 cups black chocolate buttercream, recipe below
- 1½ cups sprinkles of choice
- gold edible paint*
- Piping bag + tips of choice
- Bench scraper
- Offset spatula
- Thin pastry brush
- Place one chocolate cake on the serving tray and coat the top of it with a thick layer of chocolate frosting.
- Take the second chocolate cake and place this cake on top of the first and frost with chocolate buttercream
- Place the third cake on top of the second and frost the sides and top of the cake with chocolate buttercream, this is your base coat. Place it in the fridge to set for 20 minutes.
- Place 1½ cups of chocolate buttercream in a piping bag and snip off the tip to make a ½ inch hole.
- Remove the cake from the refrigerator and pipe a 4-5 inch section of frosting around the center of the cake (this is where the sprinkles will go). Use a bench scraper to smooth out this middle section (do not worry about the top and bottom portions of the cake looking rough, we'll deal with this later)
- Add your sprinkles to the middle section of the cake, covering as much of the area as possible.
- Add more frosting to your piping bag and draw thick frosting lines around the top and bottom of your sprinkle area (as if adding a border to hold in the sprinkles). Now fill in the rest of the top and bottom of the cake with the frosting and smooth it with an offset spatula.
- Use a bench scraper, smooth out the top and bottom of the frosting you just added, careful not to press too hard or you'll knock off the sprinkles. Set into the fridge to set up for 20-minutes.
- Using your gold paint, paint edges of the fault line you created and allow it to dry.
- Pipe on your desired cake topping (I chose a rope feature) and add more sprinkles, if desired.
** If you need a little help, check out this YouTube tutorial
- 1½ cup all-purpose flour
- 1½ cups granulated sugar
- ¾ cup Dutch-processed cocoa sifted
- 1½ tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- ¾ cup hot water
- 2 tsp instant coffee
- ¼ cup vegetable oil
- ¾ cup buttermilk room temperature
- 2 large eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla
- Preheat oven to 350F
- Grease three 6-inch cake pans and dust with cocoa powder. Line bottoms with parchment then set aside.
- Place all dry ingredients into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Stir on low to combine.
- Dissolve the coffee in the hot water then set aside.
- In a medium bowl whisk together the oil, buttermilk, eggs, and vanilla.
- Temper the egg-milk mixture by slowly whisking in the hot coffee (you don't want to cook the eggs!)
- Add the coffee-egg mixture to the dry ingredients and mix on medium for 2-3 mins. The batter will be very thin, that's okay!
- Pour the batter evenly into the prepared pans. (I used a kitchen scale to ensure the batter is evenly distributed.)
- Bake for 25-30 minutes, rotating the pans in oven halfway through. Bake until a cake tester comes out clean.
- Cool 10 minutes in the pans then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
- 1 cup unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
- 1 cup vegetable shortening
- 2 tablespoons meringue powder
- 8 cups confectioners' sugar
- ½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- ¼ cup half & half (heavy cream or milk will work)
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 2 teaspoons black food coloring
- In the bowl of a mixer, beat the softened butter, shortening, and meringue powder until creamy.
- Add in the confectioners' sugar, cocoa powder, salt and vanilla extract. Mix on low to combine.
- With the mixer on low, stream in the half & half until you have a thick, chocolate buttercream. Adjust the frosting consistency by adding 1 additional tablespoon of frosting at a time.
- Add in the black food coloring and mix to fully combine.