Rich chocolate Bundt cake, brown butter icing and toffee … need we say more? This is a combination truly made in heaven, but one you can enjoy right here on earth with this fun, festive and easy recipe! It’s pretty too, and the crystal solids in the butter are the perfect complement to the chocolate in the cake and the toffee.
Brown butter makes everything taste special with the rich nutty flavor and the delicious aroma. It’s nice to have on hand to use for baking, on potatoes, veggies or pasta and especially in cakes and frosting. If possible, make the brown butter ahead of time and chill it until you’re ready to use it. This will save a lot of time when making the icing. We like to brown a few sticks of butter whenever we have time and keep it in the refrigerator until we want to make something with it! Be sure to note that the butter loses much of its water content when you brown it, so be sure to weigh or measure the butter for the recipe after browning it. For this recipe, 4 ounces of butter turned into 2 ounces after it was browned. The amount of water in your butter to begin with will determine how much volume is lost, and every butter differs slightly.
We used the Chocolate Bundt Cake from Two Peas and Their Pod as the base for our cake, but added melted dark chocolate to make it even more moist and more rich and a teaspoon of cider vinegar for a texture as well as flavor. The vinegar really brings out the rich chocolatey taste and gives the cake a little more lift. The cake all by itself is delicious, but when you add the brown butter icing and toffee, you have a very special and beautiful dessert!
We used Trader Joe’s holiday English Toffee with Nuts, which comes in a gigantic 30 ounce tin, and is really deliciously crunchy. We hate it when the toffee is chewy and gets stuck in your teeth. But, you can use any toffee you like, and if you make your own toffee, even better!
We hope you have as much fun with this cake as we did! 🍰
Chocolate Bundt Cake with Brown Butter Icing and Toffee Bits
Equipment
- 1 standard Bundt pan 10 or 12 cup size
Ingredients
Chocolate Bundt Cake
- 8 oz. unsalted butter 1 cup or 2 sticks
- 1/3 cup cocoa powder Dutch processed
- 1 cup water
- 2 oz. dark chocolate, chopped we use 62% cacao
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
- 1 tsp. salt
- 2 large eggs
- 1/2 cup plain nonfat Greek yogurt
- 1 tsp. cider vinegar
- 1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
Brown Butter Icing
- 4 oz. unsalted butter
- 2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
- 5 tbsp. milk +/-
Toffee Bits
- 1 1/2 cups English toffee, chopped
Instructions
Chocolate Bundt Cake
- Spray or grease a 12-cup Bundt pan and dust with flour. Set aside. Preheat oven to 350° F.
- Combine butter, cocoa powder, chopped dark chocolate, and water in a saucepan and cook over medium-low heat, stirring often, just until melted. Remove from heat and set aside.
- In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, salt and baking soda and whisk together to combine. Add half of the chocolate mixture to the dries and stir well to combine. Add remaining chocolate mixture to the batter and stir until completely blended.
- Add eggs, one at a time, stir well after each. Whisk in yogurt, cider vinegar, and vanilla and blend well.
- Pour batter into prepared pan and bake in the center of the oven for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove from oven and cool for 15 minutes before inverting onto a cooling rack. When the cake is completely cooled, move it to the cake serving plate.
- While the cake is cooling, prepare the icing and chop the toffee.
Brown Butter Icing
- We like to brown the butter ahead of time, so when we’re ready to make the icing we are ready to go quickly. But, to brown the butter, place it in a pan with a light colored bottom. (This way you can see when the butter is brown.) Cook over low heat for 10-15 minutes, or until the butter takes on a nutty aroma and begins to form bubbles and brown crystals along the edge and on the bottom of the pan. Remove from heat and cool. This can take a longer or shorter amount of time, depending upon the water content of the butter you use, as well as the temperature of your burner. Allow the butter to cool completely.
- Beat or whisk the brown butter with the powdered sugar and milk until smooth and the icing is the consistency where you can drizzle the icing, but it will hold as it falls down the cake. This should be somewhere between frosting and glaze consistency. Drizzle the icing over the entire top of the cake. The icing will drip down into the center and along the sides of the cake.
- Evenly sprinkle toffee bits over the icing while it is still soft and a bit moist, so that the toffee will hold in place. Serve cake at room temp.
