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
