Tuesday, May 12, 2015

The antics of the wrong/right chocolate cake


Yesterday I was in a Chocolate cake kinda mood.  I spent a couple minutes on Pinterest and found a couple of recipes that I wanted to try.  One was an "old school" mayonnaise cake.  The other was a chocolate layer cake.  I've been looking for a new chocolate cake recipe so I was anxious to get my bake on. :)

When I got home last night, I was rushing around and trying to make dinner while baking a cake (mistake one).  I grabbed the tablet (which is not as reliable as I would like) to find my recipe and went straight to my pins (mistake 2).  I was impatient so I went straight to find the mayonnaise cake and opened the link for the 1st chocolate cake pin I came to.  I started rounding up my ingredients (mistake 3).  I started reading through the instructions and it said “prepare 3 pans”.  It didn’t’ surprise me that there was no order for mixing – many old recipes don’t have it.  I know that wet mixes with dry last so I started with the wet ingredients.  Buttermilk – darn – I didn’t have any (spidey senses started to tingle but I ignored them – Mistake 4).  I made buttermilk and added it to my eggs and vanilla.  Then added the brown and white sugar…then noticed I hadn’t added any oil/fat type ingredient…hmmmm I started looking through the recipe, looking for the mayonnaise…and that’s when I realized I had grabbed the wrong recipe!!  LOL  By that point I was committed.  Had I read further into the instructions, I would have noticed the part about creaming the softened butter with the white and brown sugar – bla bla – which I didn’t do (mistake 5) because I was rushing…so instead – the butter got mixed into the liquid mixture to become floaty lumps that would be incorporated into the flour mixture.  I wasn’t sure what to expect. The cake baked for nearly an hour (in a bundt pan) while I worked on the frosting of the wrong cake. Lol  It called for 12 oz of semi sweet chocolate – melted and cooled.  Well- all I had was the tail end of a bag of chocolate chips (a little over a cup’s worth) so I melted those and added some cream. 

In the end – I wound up frosting the cake when it was still a touch warm, so the butter based frosting kinda melted off.   I had to toss it in the freezer to set up a little better…it was quite an exercise in what NOT to do when baking a cake. Lol  Surprisingly, it actually turned out quite well.  It was a little fluffier than I would have liked (likely because of all the last minute beating to mix the butter lumps in) but not dry at all.  The frosting wasn’t quite as rich as it would have been if I had had the semi sweet chocolate to melt, but it was still really good. 

I’m anxious to try it again, though, and follow the actual instructions.  It’s still a cake I’d be happy to serve to anyone as is (but because I’m a cake snob – I’ll eat it myself and share the next one. J)  If you get a chance to try this recipe out - give it a whirl! :) You won't be sorry. :)  (just follow the instructions and avoid doing what I did. lol