Home Matters Step By Step: Valentine Heart-Shaped Cake

Photo by: AHS Contributor

The best holiday celebrations always start at home, like this festive Valentine dessert. This simple heart-shaped cake doesn’t require a special pan or equipment, and you can use your favorite cake recipe or mix paired with the icing of your choice. Bring some holiday flair into your home with this heart-stopping cake that everyone is sure to love. Here’s how to make it, step by step:
 

Step 1:

Assemble all the ingredients for your cake and icing. We used a red velvet cake mix and homemade cream cheese icing. Other good combinations for Valentine’s would be chocolate cake with chocolate icing, strawberry cake with strawberry or vanilla icing, white cake with white icing . . .whatever your heart desires.
 

Step 2:

You will need one round cake pan (8” or 9”) and one square cake pan (8” or 9”). You can use either size specified in your cake recipe, just make sure that both pans are the same dimension. For assembling and serving the cake, you will also need a very large square or rectangular tray. If you don’t have a tray that large, cover a baking tray or broiler pan with aluminum foil (shiny side up) and turn upside down.
 

Step 3:

Follow your specific cake recipe directions for preparing the pans. For our recipe, we sprayed the pans with a vegetable cooking spray, and then we lined the pans with wax paper to make the cake layers easy to remove. To make the wax paper liners, place your cake pans on a strip of wax paper.



Then, trace the pan bottoms with a marker and use scissors to cut along the outlines.



Place the cutouts in the bottoms of the pans, and then spray the pans again lightly with the vegetable spray.
 

Step 4:

Mix your cake according to your recipe directions.
 

Step 5:

Divide the cake batter evenly between the two pans, and bake cake according to package directions.
 

Step 6:

When the cake layers are done, cool the layers on a wire rack.
 

Step 7:

As the layers are cooling, mix the icing ingredients according to your recipe directions. (For the homemade cream cheese icing, we mixed together one 8-oz. package of softened cream cheese and one stick of softened unsalted butter. Then, we added four cups of powdered sugar and two tablespoons of vanilla extract. We added cream, one tablespoon at a time, until the icing was spreading consistency.)
 

Step 8:

When the cake layers are cool enough, carefully turn each layer upside down onto a cutting board or counter and peel off the wax paper liners. If the layers are still warm, let them cool completely before proceeding to the next step.
 

Step 9:

Using a sharp knife, cut the round layer exactly in half. Leave the square layer whole.
 

Step 10:

Turn the square layer with the points going up and down to look like a diamond shape, and carefully position it onto your serving tray.
 

Step 11:

Take the two round layer halves, and put them with the straight sides touching each top side of the cake diamond on the serving tray. If necessary, carefully trim the bottom corners of the round halves to line up with the middle points of the diamond. Spread the icing on the cake, taking care to cover the seams where the two layers meet.
 

Step 12:

Decorate the cake with colored sugar or Valentine candies. Serve the cake to someone you love or give it as a gift.

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