Two tier chocolate cake

 

I’m making a tiered cake tomorrow for my aunt (more explanations, and pictures, will follow soon!) I’ve never actually made a tiered cake before, actually. Not really, with the different size cakes stacked on top of each other, and such. So I thought I’d test it out first, make a test cake, if you will. I needed to check to see if this particular chocolate cake recipe would be solid enough to take another tier (it was). This cake worked out beautifully, and I could finally try my hand at the rose-icing technique I’ve been wanting to try forever.

As luck would have it, my friend came by that evening so I gave her the cake and told her to take it to work with her. The text she sent me the next day saying “my coworkers are big fans!” made me smile all day.

Chocolate layer cake

 

One of my brother’s friends is having a birthday party tonight. Every guest is supposed to make  something sweet; of course my brother took the easy route by asking me to bake something. He said I could make whatever I wanted. It can get a bit overwhelming, when you get complete free range like that, can’t it? There are so many things I want to bake, and sometimes it’s hard to decide. Especially when you’re not the one who will be doing the eating. What if my brother’s friends – and the birthday boy! – don’t like what I chose? In the end I decided to go with chocolate. Because, honestly, who doesn’t like chocolate? I’m very pleased with the end result and, to be honest, slightly bitter that I have to give this whole cake away without being able to have a taste!

I took this Devil’s Food cake recipe from this post; I decided to go with a vanilla butter cream instead of the meringue frosting they used. I got some inspiration for the decoration from this lovely post but ended up using (store bought) meringue to top off the cake instead of piping even more butter cream on top of the ganache. I was afraid it’d be a bit of a butter cream overkill!

Layered chocolate cake

 

I made this extravagant chocolate cake after my mom was cleaned out a cupboard and found a couple of cooking magazines from a while back. Or rather Christmas 2011 back. It doesn’t need to be Christmas, however, to enjoy some chocolate. Enjoying chocolate is more of a 7/7 365/365 kind of job anyway, isn’t it?

This particular Christmas magazine, for full disclosure, was Woman & Home – Feel Good Food Christmas (and it definitely made me feel good!)