Best Chocolate Layer Cake with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

Everyone needs a perfect homemade cake recipe, and this is the Best Chocolate Layer Cake! The recipe is easy to make and always turns out perfectly. With step-by-step instructions for how to assemble and decorate layer cakes, even beginner cake bakers will succeed!

This has become my most favorite, go-to chocolate cake recipe. Everyone needs a great homemade chocolate layer cake recipe in their pocket, and this is mine. 

Once you have a great chocolate cake recipe, the flavor combinations are endless. While I’m presenting this one as a chocolate layer cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, the cake can be mixed and matched into endless combinations.

Vanilla frosting. Peanut butter frosting. Oreo frosting. Raspberry frosting. Filled with chopped nuts or candy or fruit. But all these cakes start with a great chocolate cake base – and this is that chocolate cake.

A very similar version of the cake is used in my most popular layer cake recipe: a chocolate peanut butter cup cake. 

This cake is light and fluffy; not at all dense and heavy, like a chocolate bundt cake or chocolate pound cake. It’s moist with a tight crumb – perfect for decorating with lots of frosting. I’ve made it as two, three, and four layer cakes.

It is, truly, the best chocolate layer cake.