Pink Champagne Cake {Scratch Recipe}
Today we are excited to share a uniquely light and flavorful recipe with you for Pink Champagne Cake.
This elegant dessert, with its moist champagne infused layers & delicious buttercream is perfect for weddings, engagement parties, anniversaries, Valentine's Day, New Year's Eve, or any occasion that calls for something special.
Table of Contents
Why Pink Champagne Cake? A Quick History!
Southern bakers have been flavoring their cakes with sweet beverages for decades (Lemonade Cake, 7 up cake, etc.) but Pink Champagne cake takes that practice to a whole new level of delicious sophistication.
It is believed that Pink Champagne Cake first originated on the west coast in the '50s and '60s, and was a hugely popular choice for bridal showers, weddings, and bachelorette parties.
There's just something a bit glamorous about a dessert flavored with Pink Champagne, don't you think? The Los Angeles Times printed a Pink Champagne Cake decades ago and to this day it remains one of its most requested.
If you like Pink Champagne, you are going to fall in love with this recipe. While the pink champagne isn't overpowering, the flavor is unmistakable.
We love to fill and frost the layers with our Pink Champagne Buttercream Frosting, but traditionally pink champagne cakes have often been paired with bavarian cream or coconut fillings.
How to Make Pink Champagne Cake
You can find our full Pink Champagne Cake Recipe at the bottom of this post. Here is a quick rundown of our steps!
- First, preheat the oven to 350℉ and grease & flour three 8 inch round pans. We also like to line the pans with circles of parchment paper.
- In a medium size bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside
- In another bowl combine the egg whites, champagne, vanilla extract, and vegetable oil. Whisk until blended and set aside.
- In the bowl of your mixer, cream the butter and sugar 3 to 5 minutes until light and fluffy.
- While mixing on low speed, and the flour mixture and egg whites mixture alternately. Start and end with the dry ingredients. We do three additions of dry ingredients and two additions of wet. Mix just until incorporated.
- Pour into prepared pans and bake 25 to 30 minutes. The cake is done when a toothpick inserted the center comes out clean. Cool in baking pans 10 min. then turn out.
Pink Champagne Buttercream
We frosted our champagne cake layers with a delicious Pink Champagne Buttercream! We made extra since we did a lot of piping with our design. This recipe is so easy, pipes great, and has a light champagne flavor.
It is a simple combination of softened butter, confectioners sugar, pink champagne, vanilla, a pinch of salt, and pink coloring if you'd like!
Recipe FAQs
Champagne Cakes and More
We have several more great champagne cakes to share with you! Aside from today's Pink Champagne Cake from scratch, we also have a delicious, easy Pink Champagne Cake from a mix!
Other popular recipes are our Champagne and Strawberries Cake , Strawberry Champagne Cake and Champagne Pound Cake.
Here are a few more of our favorite "Boozy Cakes" (including Limoncello Cake, Pina Colada Cake, and more) that are sure to make your special occasions more special.
Thanks so much for stopping by! Don't miss our full collection of Cake Recipes, which include our favorite cake recipes from scratch as well as cake mix recipes!
If you are interested in cake design, we have so many free Cake Decorating tutorials to share with you as well!
Have you made this? We would LOVE for you to leave a ⭐️ rating as well as a comment and photo below! We really appreciate your feedback!
Pink Champagne Cake {Scratch Recipe}
Ingredients
For the Pink Champagne Cake
- 3 cups (342 g) cake flour
- 1 Tablespoon (15 g) baking powder
- ½ teaspoon (2g) salt
- 6 egg whites (194g)
- 1 cup (242g) pink champagne, I used Andre Blush Champagne
- 2 teaspoons (8g) vanilla
- 2 Tablespoons vegetable oil 18 g
- 2 cups (400g) sugar
- 2 sticks (226 g total) unsalted butter, softened slightly
- Small amount of pink food color I used AmeriColor Deep Pink but any pink would be fine. I added the color with a toothpick, just a small amount will give you blush pink
For the Pink Champagne Buttercream* This is a Double Batch
- 4 sticks (452g total) unsalted butter, softened *See Notes
- 12 cups (1380g) powdered sugar
- 4 teaspoons (16g) vanilla
- 1 teaspoon (6g) salt
- ½ cup (122g) pink champagne
- Pink Coloring Gel of Choice We used a touch of Americolor Deep Pink
Instructions
For the Cake
- Preheat the oven to 350℉ and grease & flour three 8 inch round pans. We also like to line the pans with circles of parchment paper.
- In a medium size bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside
- In another bowl combine the egg whites, champagne, vanilla and vegetable oil. Whisk until blended and set aside.
- In the bowl of your mixer, mix the butter and sugar on medium speed for 3 to 5 minutes until light and fluffy.
- While mixing on low speed, and the flour mixture and egg whites mixture alternately. Start and end with the dry ingredients. We do three additions of dry ingredients and two additions of wet. Mix just until incorporated.
- Pour into prepared pans and bake 25 to 30 minutes. The cake is done when a toothpick inserted the center comes out clean. Cool in baking pans 10 min. then turn out.
- *Makes 7 ½ cups of batter.
For the Pink Champagne Buttercream
- Cream the softened butter until smooth and lightened in color
- Blend in the salt and vanilla
- Gradually add the powdered sugar with the champagne until the powdered sugar is incorporated. Beat at medium speed 3 to 4 minutes. The texture will become very smooth. If you are tinting the entire batch of buttercream light pink, you can add a very small amount of coloring gel while it is mixing.
- This recipe makes approximately 8 cups of frosting.
Hi Cynthia, Yes, you can bake the layers in three 9" round cake pans, the layers will not be quite as thick as baking in an 8" pan but it will be fine.
I am not a baker but my daughter in law is. I would like her to make this one for one of her boys birthday or maybe all four. Maybe even mine or her mom's. By the way does the alcohol get cooked off? The boys are 4, 6 and 7 years.
I am wondering if comments here are for the scratch recipe- or the doctored one.
I use Mexican Vanilla which is stronger than others- so I actually add LorAnn sparkling wine flavoring as well to my recipe
I just made this cake and the buttercream exactly as listed. I love it and don't understand why so many people want to make changes to it, don't change anything it's a perfect recipe ❤️... I made it for practice today; but this weekend it will be cupcakes for a party!!
I made this cake for my daughter's birthday. It was absolutely delicious. The cake was delicate and tender and the buttercream was delicious. I added 1/2 tsp of Princess cake emulsion (a friend suggested I try it-supposed to give cakes a "professional" flavor) and a drop to the frosting. Lent a cream cheese taste to the cake. I will say I was not able to duplicate the pretty loops but that was my own fault-lack of skills and proper tools. The recipe is outstanding!
Thanks so much for your comments Julie and Rachel! So happy that you loved the recipe! xo
@Maria, sorry I missed your question. I'm not sure how much of the alcohol is cooked off...my guess would be that most is but of course there would be trace amounts in the cake and definitely in the frosting.
Here how my cake looks the inside
Hi. Thanks for recepi. Made this gor first time, but it's came not as expected. It's too moist and heavy. What can be a reason? I did use cream cheese on heavy cream.
Hi Irina, Your cake is perfectly beautiful!! I am sorry there was a problem. In the picture I see dark red above the bottom layer and a thinner red streaks above that. Is that a raspberry filling? If it is I think that the filling or the cream cheese frosting, if it was very wet must have seeped into the cake layer making it too moist and heavy. That is what I think happened because if the layers came out of the oven and were nice and light something that came into contact with them must have caused the change. Let me know what you think.
Thank you for the answer. Yes, the red layer is raspberry jelly. I think the reason was cream and jelly. Butter cream is better for this sort of cake,but we don't really like buttercream,that's why decided to change it on other one. Next time will do with buttercream. Anyway, it was delicious...
Hi Irina, I think possibly the raspberry puree was not thick enough and seeped into the layer. Bakers use raspberry filling often without a problem so if you cook it a bit longer to reduce the liquid and thicken it, the problem could be solved. I'm sure next time will be better. I'm happy you liked the flavor.
Success with this lovely recipe everyone loved it❤