Do you love someone who loves cake? 

Valentine’s Day is an ancient feast day, but making heart-shaped sweets to celebrate it started in the age of Queen Victoria. By the early 20th century, the Cadbury chocolate company was making heart-shaped boxes full of candy, and the mid-February issues of American newspapers and magazines were stuffed with recipes for heart-shaped cakes and cookies. 

For this Valentine cake you need two 8-inch cake pans; one square and one round. You make the heart by aligning the square cake and the two halves of the round cake and applying a layer of raspberry frosting over the whole thing.

This basic recipe is adapted from “The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion.” 

Yellow Cake

Ingredients:

1 and ½ sticks (6 oz.) butter

4 eggs plus 2 yolks

1 ¾ cups (12¼ oz.) sugar

¾ teaspoon salt

2½ teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 ¾ cups (11½ oz.) all-purpose flour

1 cup plain yogurt

½ cup milk

Take the butter and eggs out of the refrigerator and allow them to come to room temperature.

Position the racks near the middle of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees.

Prepare two 8-inch cake pans, one round and one square. Butter and flour the bottom and sides of each pan, or butter each pan and put a precut piece of parchment on the bottom, with a very thin coat of butter on top of the parchment.

Using stand mixer, cream butter, sugar, salt, baking powder and vanilla until it is fluffy and almost white in color. This will take at least five minutes.

Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each one.

Whisk together the yogurt and milk. Working by hand, gently fold in half of the yogurt mixture. Fold in the second third of the flour, the rest of the yogurt mixture and finally the rest of the flour.

Spread the batter into the two prepared pans to the same depth. They should be no more than ¾ full.

Using the back of a wooden spoon, spread the batter slightly higher at the edges than in the center of the pans. This makes it more likely that the cakes will rise to the same height. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes until the cakes pull away from the sides of the pans, and a toothpick inserted into the center of the cakes comes out clean.

Cool for 10 minutes in the pans and then take the cakes out of the pans to cool completely on a rack.

Split the 8-inch round cake in half and place the halves along two flat sides of the 8-inch square to form a heart.

Raspberry Frosting

Adapted from the “Big Pink Cake” in Tom Hudgens’ book of American home-cooking, “The Commonsense Kitchen: 500 Recipes + Lessons for a Hand-Crafted Life.”

Ingredients:

8 oz. mashed fresh raspberries and another 4 oz. of whole berries to decorate the cake

¼ cup sugar

3 cups heavy cream

¼ teaspoon lemon extract

¼ teaspoon vanilla extract

Mash the raspberries with the sugar and heat the mixture over low heat or in a microwave for a minute or so — just until the sugar dissolves.

Strain the raspberry mixture, and capture the juice in a bowl, pressing down on the solids with the back of a spoon to remove the seeds.

Cool the raspberry juice and add the heavy cream, lemon and vanilla extracts.

Whip the raspberry cream mixture just until it holds its shape and is spreadable.Coat the cake by mounding the frosting on top and spreading it to the edges and down the sides of the cake. Smooth the frosting and decorate with the rest of the berries