Chocolate Cake with Neopolitan Swiss Meringue Buttercream

As we will be leaving Japan in a few weeks, we have had a number of goodbye parties. One of them was with our two closest families in the neighborhood. We rented a room in our condo and all of us - six parents and six kids - spent hours together hanging out, talking, eating delicious foods, and watching our kids play. It's crazy how big they have gotten. The first time we hung out, K was about Touji's age and the oldest kid was only about two. Now K is almost four and the oldest will be six this summer.

For the party, I wanted to bring a cake. I started with my standard chocolate cake recipe, baked in two tins and then sliced in half giving me four cake layers. Since the actual cake was so simple, I wanted to do something kind of fun with the frosting. I went through about 10 different ideas before settling on a Neopolitan-style frosting. I started with a vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream. Then I roughly divided that into three and got my chocolate and strawberries ready. For the chocolate, I just melted it and for the strawberries, I just pureed them with my immersion blender.

Little by little, I added both the (cooled) melted chocolate and strawberry puree to the bowls of buttercream. I was shocked at how delicious the chocolate ended up being. The consistency changed a bit, but man alive, was it amazing.

I got the cake ready and put a thin layer of frosting between each of the cake layers - cake, vanilla buttercream, cake, strawberry buttercream, cake, chocolate buttercream.

Then I crumb coated the cake with vanilla.

 

Once it was hardened, I went to frosting the cake - starting with the vanilla at the bottom of the cake, then moved to the strawberry for the middle, and chocolate at the top.

Finally using the back of a spoon, I swirled the frosting a bit and mixed the colors together. I wanted it to be reminiscent of the pastel cake I made ages ago, but it didn't end up looking nearly as pretty as that one. 

That being said, it tasted pretty delicious, so I guess it all worked out in the end.

Yum!!