Old-Fashioned Chocolate Cake with Cocoa Frost

This chocolate cake has a surprise hiding in every layer: a half cup of chocolate chips sprinkled over the batter before baking, creating pockets of melted chocolate throughout the crumb. Three layers of that, stacked with cocoa buttercream between them, make this a seriously chocolatey cake.

The cake itself is eggless and butterless. Water, corn oil, and vanilla make up the wet ingredients, which sounds like it shouldn’t work but produces an incredibly moist, tender crumb. No eggs means no structure-building protein to toughen the cake, so you get a texture that’s almost impossibly soft.

The cocoa frosting is a classic American buttercream: butter beaten with powdered sugar, cocoa, milk, and vanilla until fluffy and spreadable. It’s sweet, rich, and thick enough to hold three layers together without sliding.

Kitchen Tips

• Sift the dry ingredients. Cocoa powder clumps badly, and unsifted lumps don’t dissolve during the quick whisking step.
• Use cold water as specified. Room temperature water changes the texture of the batter and can affect how the baking soda reacts.
• Cool the layers completely before frosting. Even slightly warm cake melts the buttercream and the layers slide apart.
• Place the top layer chocolate-chip side down so you get a smooth surface for frosting. The middle layers go chip-side up for maximum gooey chocolate between layers.

Variations

• Mocha version: Replace the water with strong brewed coffee for a deeper, more complex chocolate flavor.
• Mint chocolate: Add peppermint extract to the frosting for a chocolate-mint combination.
• Peanut butter frosting: Swap half the butter in the frosting for creamy peanut butter for a chocolate-peanut butter layer cake.