New Cake Recipe

A long time ago, I ordered a Hershey's cookbook. If you sent in so many Hershey's chocolate chip packages, you'd get a cookbook. Well, the cookbook was REALLY nice. It was a hardback and spiral bound cookbook. It had glossy pages. It is one of my 'go to' cookbooks for baking...especially for cheesecakes ; )

Well, we have a couple of birthdays at work this coming week. So I'll be baking a couple of cakes to take with me. I decided to try this chocolate cream cheese cake recipe, which is baked in an oblong pan. However, the recipe in this link shows for cupcakes, which would be much better to make. It's the exact recipe I had in my cookbook.

The recipe tasted really good, but I had a few problems and I have a few suggestions to make it better.

First of all, I should've made it in the oblong pan as the recipe suggested. I decided to make it in a bundt cake pan. By making it in the bundt pan, the baking time increased dramatically. What should've taken 55 minutes to bake, took almost 2 hours to bake. This made a tough crust on the bottom of the cake. It is almost too tough to cut.

Next, my recipe called for nuts sprinkled on top of the cake. So with the bundt pan I had to put the nuts on the bottom before I added the cake batter. The nuts baked into the cake and had no flavor. I used chopped almonds. I'll skip the nuts next time.

Then, the cream cheese filling didn't sink like it should have. I'll have to dunk it to get it into the middle of the cake. What happened is the cheese colored brown because of the length of time I had to bake the cake for. The filling didn't get hard, it just colored brown and made it look like chocolate. I didn't have a nice contrast between the chocolate and the filling.

What I'll do different is make these as cupcakes as the link shows. If I make it as a cake, I'll skip the nuts and add a simple glaze or ganache. And I'll dunk the cheese filling.

All in all, this cake was a winner. Being it was the first time I made it and I didn't follow the directions exactly, it's my fault I didn't have a pretty cake. I usually make a first recipe like it says the first time. Then I'll fix it up to my tastes. Live and learn!

I hope you have a great weekend.

Take care.