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frankenstein cake

frankenstein cake

Hello from New York City!

I got here last Thursday at 6:30AM, bleary from my red eye flight and dehydrated from a slight bout of food poisoning (from my last decadent San Francisco meal, nonetheless — a rather appropriate goodbye from the city). I was seriously worried I wasn't going to make my flight, rushing home straight from work to dispose of my mattress, clean the apartment bathroom, and drop off the keys. But I made it, I made it!


And things have been great so far! The first thing I did was eat a bagel from my favorite bagel place (that is so far uptown that it often gets ignored by everybody else — but that's coz everyone's a fool), cuddle my cat, and take a tour of the building's rooftop garden. This past weekend, we toured some potential future neighborhoods in Brooklyn, ate rolled-up ice cream (they literally ROLL the ice cream — not even joking), and celebrated our joint birthdays with a spicy meal at a Michelin-starred dive bar with Thai food in Nolita.

There were also 4th of July fireworks and cake!


We usually celebrate Erlend's birthday with yellow cake, but this year, I decided to switch it up with this Frankenstein cake. Our traditional yellow butter cake is still there (because it turns out I am a sucker for tradition), but this time, it was joined with an incredibly moist red velvet and black sesame cake layers. I covered the layers with a classic cream cheese frosting and mini chocolate chips, creating quite the colorful surprise when sliced.

Enjoy!



Some baker's notes:

• Okay, I know it's time consuming and ridiculous to make three different cake recipes for one cake. So real talk — I didn't actually make all the layers in the same day. Instead, I made different recipes throughout the span of three weeks, baking one layer every weekend. Cakes tend to freeze beautifully (check out The Kitchn's tips on how to freeze and store baked cakes), and tend to be easier to level and frost when chilled anyway. Alternatively, you can always make recipes for three layer 9-inch cakes in four 6-inch cake pans — reserve one layer in the freezer for any future Frankenstein cakes! This way, you can come up with all different sorts of cake combinations and not stick with mine. 


• Another great way to save time with this recipe lies with the black sesame cake layer. The recipe instructs you to toast the sesame seeds in the oven and allow them to cool completely before crushing them in a food processor. You can do this for up to one month ahead of time as long as you keep the processed seeds in an airtight container in the refrigerator — but you should be doing that anyway because black sesame seeds are so fatty, they tend to go rancid pretty quickly at room temperature.

get the recipe »

Available link for download