Amazing vanilla cinnamon cake

For our birthdays a few months back, we decided to make ourselves a birthday cake (this actually makes sense, as Chris’ b-day is the day after mine). After spending the last part of the summer watching the Food Network, we were pretty curious about the cinnamon vanilla cake with mexican hot chocolate buttercream that we saw on a Throwdown with Bobby Flay (where his chocolate cake lost to this one). I made the cake as the recipe asks, but when we hit the buttercream part, we did a little bit of math and decided that 900g worth of butter would make way too much frosting for one cake. We decided to cut the recipe in half, and we STILL had a container full of the stuff, so we ended up keeping that in the fridge, and serving the cake with an extra blob of cold, firmer frosting. The mixture of chocolates and pepper in the frosting makes it amazing, and it transports the otherwise good, but simple cinnamon cake to another level. This is definitely NOT a cake you want to tell your cardiologist about, but for special occasions it’s amazing.

UPDATE: We made this cake again last week with some Vietnamese cinnamon, and it was wonderful. The buttercream turned out well, I just continuously beat the egg whites and sugar while they were over the water bath until they came up to temp. Also, the instant read thermometer that my parents gave me was much easier to deal with than the candy thermometer we had before, so that made the process much easier. With the Vietnamese cinnamon, the buttercream was much spicier than the first time we made it.