Week 18: Chocolate Blackout Cake

This cake looks six stories tall. It was. And I’m so proud of how straight I got the sides. Earlier this year, I had scoped out cake recipes for my mom. She had requested a chocolate cake that incorporated coffee with a homemade chocolate buttercream. And Ina Garten had just the recipe, Beatty’s Chocolate Cake. There is even a handy dandy video.

One thing I’ll note is that the recipe says it yields 8 servings, but yields more like 12 or 15.

I didn’t made any changes except I added a full tablespoon of vanilla extract rather than a teaspoon.

Here is the mise en place.

I won’t bore you with the assembly of ingredients since you can watch it in the video. So here is the batter, ready to go into the oven.

After the layers baked, I was a tad annoyed by the bumpy texture that formed in the center of each of the layers. Not sure why that happened.

They flipped out of the pans just fine and I let them cool on racks.

Meanwhile, I made the frosting. The only trouble was that I only purchased 3.5 oz. of bittersweet chocolate when I should have purchased 7. So I improvised with some cocoa powder.

Usually when I improvise, things go awry. But the frosting actually turned out okay.

Since this was a layer cake, I used the same “cake spackle” technique as described in last week’s post, combining the crumbs of the cake scraps with a small portion of frosting.

I was making this cake for Mother’s Day and it had to survive an hour-long subway ride and I knew I would have the juggle the cake box in my arms for part of the trip, so this cake had to be STURDY.

The second layer lined up perfectly with the first.

I iced it with a thin layer of the chocolate buttercream.

The cake looked a little naked and I didn’t have enough frosting to pipe some designs, so I took some of the leftover crumbs and sprinkled them on top.

Voila!

In a twist of fate, Mom didn’t know I was baking her a cake (I wanted it to be a surprise!). So she made her own and it was pretty much the same recipe. Do I know what she likes or what?

So we had two cakes to sample. No big deal.