White Chocolate Layer Cake with Blackberry Buttercream

White Chocolate Layer Cake with Blackberry Swiss Meringue Buttercream Recipe One Perfect Mess 1

It’s starting to feel like Autumn. Right now, the streets are adorned with vivid crimsons and fiery golds, the air is crisp and laced with the scents of log fires and fresh rain, and the kitchen smells like warm hot cross buns. I’m getting ready to hibernate for a winter of baking, drinking tea, reading, lambing, going for long walks… I’m definitely a cold weather frog. And after months of no rain, dry paddocks and hungry sheep, winter couldn’t come sooner! This scrumptious cake holds the last of the season’s blackberries, and fed a gang of friends and family as we huddled by the fire last night. Three layers of fluffy white chocolate cake are held together by velvety swiss meringue buttercream, flavoured with fresh blackberries and white chocolate. The berries are a wonderful offset to the sweetness of the chocolate, and I had a lot of fun (in hindsight) experimenting with the ombre frosting effect…not as easy as it looks but definitely worth the challenge!

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Double Chocolate Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting and Blackberries

Double Chocolate Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting and Blackberries Recipe One Perfect Mess 6

This is a monster for chocolate lovers; layers of rich, moist, chocolate buttermilk cake held together in a delicious embrace by a thick, velvety, dark chocolate cream cheese frosting, topped off with fresh juicy blackberries! The cream cheese frosting is decadent, but its slight tang provides the perfect offset to the rich, chocolatey sweetness of the cake itself. And I just love blackberries…I summoned my inner jungle girl and went crawling through a dense forest near my house to pick a whole container-full of these bad boys. I came back with some pretty severe war wounds down my legs and arms, but it was so worth it.

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