Make great coffee an extra special event with this butter-rich cake flavoured with freshly-brewed Brazier’s filter coffee. It’s a straightforward cake to make and bake, and whether you ice it with a vanilla or coffee buttercream – or follow our lead and ice it with both – it will absolutely keep you buzzing with pride. Top it with some crushed toasted hazelnuts and shards of our Grenada Chocolate Company 71% Organic Chocolate, for a showstopping finish.

If you want to go simpler, without the icing, try sprinkling the top of the cake mixture in the tins with our BakeryBits pearl sugar, or sugar crumbs. It’s an old-fashioned, very delicious way to finish the cakes so they look charming and taste good too.

We’ve used our excellent round 8-inch diameter Chicago Metallic Unglazed Professional Sponge Cake Tins here, as they’re deep and very sturdy, do check them out.

In the photo here we’ve given the cake a grand celebration look, increasing the recipe by 50% and baking it in three tins instead of two. Forget the champagne, great coffee is the best way to celebrate and with a richly-flavoured Brazier’s Coffee Layer Cake, made with artisan miller Stoate’s organic stone-milled flour, and swirled in-between the layers and on top with a BakeryBits Madagascan Vanilla butter icing. 

We've handily created a kit that contains all our ingredients for this cake, which saves you money when compared to buying them individually.

Method

for the coffee cake

Line two 8” round cake tins with parchment paper, bottom and side. Preheat oven to 160C fan. Beat together the butter and caster sugar in a mixer on a high speed until pale in colour and fluffy. Scrape down sides of the bowl and beat in 1 egg at a time, until well incorporated. Sift in the flour and mix on a slow speed until fully combined. With the mixer still running on a slow speed, pour in the milk, until fully incorporated. Then mix in your brewed Braziers Altitude coffee.

Divide the mixture between the tins evenly then bake for 30-35 minutes until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.

for the coffee syrup

Put the syrup ingredients in a saucepan and heat until the sugar is dissolved. While the baked cakes are barely warm brush on the syrup so that it soaks into the sponge. After 10 minutes, remove cakes from the tins and wrap in clingfilm, leave to cool. The clingfilm helps keep the moisture in the sponges.

for the vanilla icing

Make this in a mixer for the fluffiest smooth result. Put the sifted icing sugar and butter in a bowl and beat till resembles breadcrumbs, then slowly add the milk. Beat on high speed till pale and light: this will take around 5 minutes. Add the vanilla powder and beat in well. Use half the icing to fill the cakes and stack. If you like you can add 50g toasted crushed hazelnuts between each layer. Use the remaining icing to coat the outside of the cake.

for the coffee icing

Put the sifted icing sugar and butter in mixer and beat till resembles breadcrumbs, then slowly add the milk. Turn up the speed to high and leave to beat the icing till pale and light: this will take around 5 minutes. Add the Brazier Altitude Coffee and combine, then spread on top of the cake.

to decorate

Dust the top of the cake with Bakery Bits Snow Sugar and Bakery Bits Pearl Sugar, along with a few Brazier Altitude coffee beans, and roasted hazelnuts to finish the cake. The chocolate shards were made using melted 71% Organic chocolate from The Grenada Chocolate Company. To make them is a bit tricky but absolutely doable. This is my rough-and-ready trick to semi-temper chocolate: heat the chocolate in a microwave to about 32C (no more, no less), beating well between each blast of heat, until smooth and runny. Cool it to 28C, dip a knife into it and wait to check that it dries in 1-2 minutes (this means the chocolate is tempered). Spread it on non-stick paper, score triangles in with a table knife as it cools, then snap into triangles and press them into the top of the cake.