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.

The MOST Decadent Cake...Easy Too!!!

While I was searching for pictures of decorations for the scholarship program at work, I came across this cake at this site. It was so easy to make and is disgustingly sweet. If you ever have a need for a very easy and pretty cake for a die-hard chocoholic, this is the one for you! Well...I didn't feel like make 8 of these cakes for the scholarship program. I considered smaller cakes, but that would've been too much work and too much worry to transport them. Then I considered the cost - about $15 to make a 9" cake. That was a Little pricy. So, (drumroll please) ta da! My cake, with a lot of help from my favorite assistant.

Kit Kat Cake

It turned out pretty well, if I do say so. I don't usually try out gimmicky stuff, but it was for someone else's birthday. She liked it a lot but she couldn't eat but one slice of it. Yeah. It's that rich. It could be considered a 'death by chocolate' cake, for sure. That's one phrase I wish I could've coined.

So, if you go to the site highlighted above, you'll see a step-by-step progression on how to build it. If you Google 'Kit Kat Cake', you'll see a picture section. Expand that and you'll see many many variations of this cake. There are lots of good ideas you can do with this, as you'll see.

I hope you enjoyed this post as much as I liked eating this cake. (I ate several slices, but don't tell anyone.)

Take care.

Happy Birthday Hubby!

Do you think my hubby deserves this???

OH YEAH! He's been a really good hubby this past year.

This is his favorite cake - Mahogany Chiffon with icing. This is totally made from scratch and well worth the effort.

He informed me he likes a buttercream icing better than a ganache. Oh well. There's next year.

Happy Birthday, Honey!

Love from your devoted wife,

Michelle