I used to make all my birthday cakes from a box – no more!  I never got the box cake to rise without excessive “doming”.  Plus, the scratch cake texture is so much better and tastier.  Pair it with scratch chocolate frosting and you will have a birthday cake to remember. Here are the ingredients for my Mom’s recipe for scratch chocolate frosting: 6 tablespoons butter at room temperature 3/8 teaspoons salt 3/4 cup cocoa 1/2 cup milk 2 1/4 teaspoons vanilla 5 1/4  cups confection sugar Cream together the soft (room temperature) butter, salt, and vanilla.  I use a mixer but you can do this by hand.  Add the cocoa and mix well.  You can use a rubber spatula to smear the mixture against the bowl to remove any lumps now; if you wait until the other ingredients are added it will be impossible to remove the lumps.  Add a little of the milk now if this mixture is too hard to handle. Once the lumps are out, then gradually add portions of the confection sugar and blend it in.  Add a little of the milk as you go to keep the mixture workable.  I usually add in the sugar in about 3 portions.  Keep adding just a little of the milk at a time but keep the frosting a little on the dry side until you have added all of the sugar.  Then when all the sugar is in, adjust the smoothness of the frosting with the remaining milk to get frosting that will spread easily, but not run down the sides of the cake. For me, it is hard to figure how dry or wet to make the frosting.  I have a hard time figuring out how much milk to put in it.  Sometimes it comes out dry and sometimes runny.  Maybe it’s because I use 1% milk, so you can try whole milk or a little cream added.  Anyway, the idea is to add the milk gradually because once you add too much you can’t take it out.  And if you do make it too runny, you can add a shake or two more of cocoa and sugar.  You want to make it runny enough to spread but not too runny that it will slide down the sides of a layer cake. Spread the frosting on a cake that has cooled.  I am not a big kitchen gadget fan, but one worthwhile investment you can make is a special frosting knife.  A cheap one will do.  They have a special wide blade and a rounded tip that make spreading frosting so much easier. The sweet & chocolate flavor of this made from this scratch frosting is outrageous and much better than from a bakery or from a can.  For the cake – this is a copycat recipe from the old box of Duncan Hines Fudge Marble Cake. Dry Ingredients: 1 ¼ cups (281 g) all purpose flour 3 ½ teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon Kosher salt (or ½ teaspoon non-iodized table salt) Cream together: ½ cup (1 stick = 113g) butter, room temperature 1 ½ cups (300 g) sugar Wet ingredients: 1 ¼ cups (307 g) whole milk ⅛ cup (28 g) vegetable oil 1 tablespoon vanilla extract 3 large eggs at room temperature Cocoa and other: 38 grams powdered cocoa Parchment paper for two 8 inch pans. ( I use PME aluminum pans which are excellent!) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Prepare two 8 inch cake pans (2 inches deep) by greasing them with butter and flouring them lightly. Then cut to fit two pieces of parchment paper and lay them inside the pans.  Cream together the butter and sugar. Then add the rest of the wet ingredients and mix on low to combine for just a minute or two. Whisk together the dry ingredients. Slowly add all the whisked dry ingredients to the wet and mix on low speed to incorporate, about a minute or three. Reserve one cup of batter aside, and stir in the cocoa to incorporate. Pour the rest of the batter across the two 8 inch prepared cake pans. Drop in blobs of all of the cocoa-colored batter and swirl them in lightly with the flat of a butter knife. Bake at 350 degrees for 18-25 minutes, depending on your oven, until an inserted butter knife comes out clean. Cool on a rack so that the bottoms won’t overcook. Use a butter knife to separate the cakes from the sides of the pan, flip them onto your hand or plate – the parchment paper will cause them to fall right out. Peel off  the parchment paper and discard. Put on the frosting after the layers are completely cooled.