Old-Fashioned Chocolate Layer Cake #TheCakeSliceBakers

Chocolate cake with chocolate icing has always been my favorite cake flavor combination. Imagine how excited I was when I found out that an Old-Fashioned Chocolate Layer Cake was one of the choices for the Cake Slice Bakers for June. A grand chocolate layer cake! What could be better?

There were a few new techniques which took it out of the old-fashioned category in my mind, but the trick of making a sort of pudding for the chocolate part of the cake, by cooking the cocoa, chocolate and water together, then cooling it before adding it to the batter, was one I will use again. It seemed to make for a very moist cake with a tender but firm crumb. Buy or borrow the book and check out this cool technique!

The second non-old-fashioned thing was making the frosting in a food processor. Since mine was unavailable when I made the frosting, I used the exact same ingredients called for, but put them together in a different manner. I creamed two sticks of butter in the bowl of my stand mixer, added the cocoa and slowly beat it to make a paste, very slowly added the salt and confectioners sugar keeping the stand mixer on low speed, then added the vanilla and corn syrup and mixed them in. Once the chocolate mixture was cool enough I added it with the mixer on low and once that was incorporated I added the remaining butter, a tablespoon at a time. Once all the butter was incorporated, I turned up the speed for about a minute to completely mix the frosting. Of course there was a lot of scraping the sides of the bowl and the beaters throughout the process.

The frosting was creamy but didn't seem to get to filled with air and it was easy to work with when I applied it to the cake layers. I used the back of the spoon method to put swirls on the top of the cake, then used a pastry bag and tip to use some more frosting to decorate the bottom with flowers, with one in the middle of the top.

The resulting layer cake was lovely to look at and delicious, but I found it overly rich. (I write 'butter' but really used non-dairy margarine since I can't tolerate butter. Maybe real butter would have been less rich, but I doubt it.) Fortunately we were able to share this delightful cake with neighbors (who proclaimed it perfect for breakfast!), and with my sister and her family. Thin slices worked out well.

I decorated the final slice with strawberries from our garden. Celebrating summer!

 Next time I would do a ganache icing or the really old fashioned one with cocoa, hot milk and confectioners sugar, both of which would probably be less rich than the Test Kitchen chocolate frosting. I wouldn't change a thing about the cake itself. I baked the layers two full days before I frosted and served it and the cake layers stayed moist just wrapped in plastic and stored at room temperature. This is a wonderful cake, but it is expensive to make if you use (as you should) high quality chocolate and cocoa. Use a chocolate that you enjoy eating since you will really taste it. I used Scharfenberger and was glad I did.

Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking through.  This year it is The Perfect Cake from America's Test Kitchen #atkcake.  We each choose one cake to bake, and then on the 20th - never before - we all post about our cake on our blogs. There are a few rules that we follow, but the most important ones are to have fun and enjoy baking & eating cakes!

Follow our Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest pages where you can find all of our cakes, as well as inspiration for many other cakes. You can also click on the thumbnail pictures below to take you to each of our cakes, or visit our blog where the links are updated each month. If you are interested in joining The Cake Slice Bakers and baking along with us, please send an email to thecakeslicebakers at gmail dot com for more details.

The choices this month were Old-Fashioned Chocolate Layer Cake, Rhubarb Ribbon Cake, Lavender Tea Cakes with Vanilla Glaze, and Summer Peach Cake.

The Cake Slice Bakers are baking from a new book "The Perfect Cake" from America's Test Kitchen.

Our choices this month are...

June 2018

1. Old-Fashioned Chocolate Layer Cake
2. Rhubarb Ribbon Cake
3. Lavender Tea Cakes with Vanilla Glaze
4. Summer Peach Cake

Visit our bakers too see what choice they baked up!

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Chocolate Beet Cupcakes #TheCakeSliceBakers

I am enjoying baking from the Cake Slice Bakers' current book The Perfect Cake by America's Test Kitchen. The recipes are well thought out and the results so far have been great.

This month has been full of all sorts of things, but one is the seemingly endless work on the garden as well as setting up our outdoor living room on the front porch. We have a white rocker with a comfy cushion, a wicker sofa and matching chair, both of which have comfortable seats that wipe down, plus lots of cushions for the back. There is a low wooden bench which can be used as a coffee table or as a bench to sit on, plus a mosaic topped table to the right of the sofa (I made the mosaic top and it is funky but fun), plus a tea cart on the other side of the sofa which can be used for serving things or just as a side table. Tying this all together is an aqua outdoor carpet with a trellis pattern. We have been spending very pleasant time here, drinking water after attacking thistle plants with shovel and machete for instance. Pi loves to hang with us there, too. At the far south part of the porch we have a round table with an umbrella where we eat sometimes. Hope to entertain some this summer on the porch. The photo below is of the garden just below the eating area and the steps leading up to the porch and front door.

When I looked at our choices for May the one that called to me most was the Chocolate-Beet Cupcakes. I love chocolate and have had chocolate-beet cake and found it delicious. What put me off a bit was that the recipe calls for using fresh red beets. I've baked with them before and they are really, really messy and stain things. When I have busy days it is hard to imagine adding to my workload by having to do extra cleanup due to fresh beets. I had visions of the shredded beets erupting in the microwave and having to clean out the scattered beet threads, then wash out the whole inside of the microwave. No thank you. Soooo I ended up using small whole canned beets (which can still get messy, but not nearly as much as fresh beets). I shredded them and skipped the cooking part of the recipe. Worked like a charm and very little mess.

I also made a half recipe because there are only two of us. Sweetie has tried one to make sure it isn't poison, but the other five are above. Besides halving the recipe, I followed the recipe with the exception of using soy milk instead of regular milk.

I would have changed one direction if I were writing the recipe. As written you place the shreeded cooked beets in the bowl of the food processor and then melt chocolate in the microwave. Once the chocolate is melted you whisk in cocoa powder and vegetable oil.  I would change the steps. Once the chocolate is melted, I would add that to the beets in the bowl but not process it, then use the same bowl the chocolate was melted in to mix together the oil and cocoa, then add that to the beets in the processor bowl. Once it all gets processed I think the result would be the same and mixing just the cocoa and oil would be far easier than mixing three different textures...melted chocolate, dry cocoa, and liquid oil.

I also skipped the frosting because even halving the recipe I would have a cup of leftover frosting...what on earth would I do with that?

These were delicious cupcakes all on their own and a dusting of powdered sugar made them even prettier. I tried to dust the sugar through a paper doily but it didn't work too well. The cupcake itself was not too sweet and was a nice deep chocolate color and had true chocolate flavor...no taste of beet that I could identify. It was also very moist...yum!

I don't post the recipes from this book. Do yourself a favor and purchase a copy of the book. It has classic and original cakes and is a keeper.

Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking through.  This year it is The Perfect Cake from America's Test Kitchen #atkcake.  We each choose one cake to bake, and then on the 20th - never before - we all post about our cake on our blogs. There are a few rules that we follow, but the most important ones are to have fun and enjoy baking & eating cakes!

Follow our Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest pages where you can find all of our cakes, as well as inspiration for many other cakes. You can also click on the thumbnail pictures below to take you to each of our cakes, or visit our blog where the links are updated each month. If you are interested in joining The Cake Slice Bakers and baking along with us, please send an email to thecakeslicebakers at gmail dot com for more details.

The choices this month were Cream Cheese Coffee Cake, Chocolate-Beet Cupcakes, Rainbow Cake, and Swiss Hazelnut Cake.

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Cake Slice Bakers Peanut Butter Pretzel Cake

The Cake Slice Bakers are super excited because we have been given access to unpublished recipes for the book The Perfect Cake and this month we are baking some of those cakes. We had a choice between

1. Fallen Chocolate Cakes p.96
2. King Cake p.280
3. Peanut Butter Pretzel Cake p.166
4. Saffron-Orange Bundt Cake p.342

I chose the Peanut Butter Pretzel Cake because it had a technique I've never tried before and I wanted to see how well it worked. The usual process for a butter cake is to cream the butter and the sugar, add eggs and incorporate them, and then add the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients, often alternating between wet and dry.

This cake is quite different since the dry ingredients are mixed together, then the butter is basically cut into the dry ingredients until peas sized, similar to how you start a pastry. The wet ingredients, including the egg white, are mixed together in a glass measuring cup and then added to the butter/dry ingredient mixture in two parts.

Because this makes a three layer 8-inch in diameter cake I decided to divide the recipe and bake one third in a 6-inch diameter cake pan. I figured that would make it tall enough that I could just cut the layer in half and have a small cake. There are only two of us and so making a three layer large cake is silly. Unfortunately, the cake didn't rise very much, so I ended up baking another third of the recipe so that the finished cake would be proportionally tall enough.

I ran into another problem. My food processor isn't working at the moment and the recipe called for making a flour out of the broken small pretzels. My work-around was to put them in a plastic bag and crush them finely with a rolling pin. It worked pretty well, but the ground pretzels may have allowed for a taller layer. For the second go round I was also low on pretzels, so I substituted almond flour. For both I weighed the ingredients on my food scale. The almond flour layer had a much finer texture but we ended up liking the pretzel layer a little better, even if it was a bit lumpy...it just had a nicer crumb overall.

The frosting is delicious, with a true peanut butter flavor and it's very rich and fluffy. I made a full recipe, having forgotten that I didn't need that much. It was the next day and I was tired, to tell the truth. Still, I was able to be generous with the frosting. Although I didn't have a large number of pretzels left, I did have enough to circle the bottom of the cake with whole ones. I don't like candied peanuts, so I skipped that part, and then I decided to have the cake pop by using a small amount of ganache to decorate the top and down the sides. The tiny bit of extra bitter ganache really tempered the super rich and sweet frosting, so, even though the recipe doesn't call for it, you may want to add it if you make this recipe.

Because The Perfect Cake is not in print yet, I won't be including the recipe, but you can order it in advance to be sure that you can make this wonderful cake once the book is available.