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 Anne, For a strawberry filling:
2 to 2 1/2 cups strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
3 Tablespoons cornstarch
Thinly slice the strawberries, add to a saucepan with the sugar and cornstarch. Slowly heat the strawberries and sugar, pressing the strawberries against the side of the pan to crush. Gradually increase the heat, stir constantly until the mixture begins to thicken. Remove from the heat. The mixture will continue to thicken a bit more as it cools. Cool completely before using as a filling. Don't spread all the way to the edge of the cake layers, stop about 1 inch from the edge. As a cake layer covers it, it will spread closer to the edge.
Best champagne cake recipe ive found! I halved this recipe and made 12 cupcake instead of a full cake and made a vanilla bean champagne butter cream frosting and they were the bomb! You can taste the champagne in the cake and theyre light and fluffy. Most recipes ive tried come out heavy and dense or you cant taste champagne at all. This was perfect thank you so much!
Hi Victoria, Thank you so much for your nice review of the recipe, so happy you gave it a try.
I just make the cake. It was soft, moist and so good. Will be making it again and again.
Hi Brenda! I'm so happy that you loved the recipe! Thanks so much for your feedback. xoxo
Hi, thanks for sharing this recipe it seemed really easy to do, although all 3 of my cakes sank in the middle ? before I’d even opened the oven, any advice would be welcome, as I have to now re do it again, as it’s my my Nieces communion after party. I used caster sugar instead of granulated, (I’m in the UK) but I did increase the sugar amount accordingly, thank you X
Hi Jackie, I'm sorry your cakes sank. I think the problem was with the extra sugar added. Sugar is considered to be as a liquid in a recipe. Use the measurement listed in the recipe for your caster sugar. Granulated sugar in the UK is a much larger grain than our granulated sugar in the US. Our granulated sugar is actually closer to your caster sugar than. For this reason you can use the same measurement as we do. All will go well the next time you try the recipe.
Thanks for replying so quickly! Ok cool, I’ll give it another go with the same sugar amount. I did think maybe it was for that reason, as the top went very crusty as well. I only bought a small bottle of fizz, so I’m off to get another bottle ?? x
I was excited to try this, I followed directions carefully and read a few times before I started to make sure I had all the right items. well, the flavor was very nice, the cake after done with 2 layers was about one inch high, and was more the texture of shorbread, the frosting turned out great. because there was so little cake I had a lot of frosting left over so I had a box of cake mix and substituted the champagne for the water and it turned out nicely ( I did use 'cake flour' which I thought from what I know of it that it makes a lighter cake, ) in this case it did not
Hi, I was just wondering if I should weigh everything rather than measuring. If I weighed three cups of cake flour it was much more than what this recipe said. Should I just ignore what I got and rather work with the weight of everything on this recipe? Please help ??
Hi Julia, The most accurate measurement is to weigh your ingredients. Did you remember to zero out the weight of the bowl before adding the flour? To measure flour it should be lightly spooned into a measuring cup and leveled off with the back of a knife, it is 114 grams per cup (342g for 3 cups). If you were to dip a measuring cup into flour and sweep it out it would weight around 130 grams because you are packing it into the cup. Yes, work with the weight of everything in the recipe.
If this is the case and it relates to what happened in my case, then the recipe should indicate exactly to weigh the cup before adding flour and weigh the flour and what the weight should be per cup. I did not 'pack' the flour ( I have worked in restaurants most of my life an know proper ways to do things , but I have never made a cake like this before), thank you for sending me a mail that was in answer to Julia's question, I guess you believed that the weight of flour was the problem and your answer to her should be the answer to my question/comment also