The Great Cake Part II: Chocolate

     

     I had issues with my butterscotch cake. It came out a little bit flat. I sat there and stared at it, lost and sad. Why are you flat? I asked it in my mind. Did I not substitute well enough for self rising cake flour? Do you just hate me? And, then I realized something. At home the round pans are all 8 inches. I have never even thought about it. How big is my pan? 9 in round. Ah.

     So, my other cake layers required some googling around. Also, Nigella didn't have the kind of chocolate cake I wanted (plain and easily stackable). She is still the best though, don't you doubt it. The first way that I google for recipes involves going to my favorite food blogs and searching their websites. I hit gold very quickly at Joy the Baker's. She makes me happy, you should read her blog. But other than that, she also has a great recipe for a Double Chocolate Devil's Food Cake that makes exactly enough batter for two 9'' rounds! All I had to do was cut the recipe in half and I was done.

I still ran out of bowls though- yay the rice cooker!

     But, it was not just me. I was cooking with someone else: AN! Meet AN, she is super great and she has suffered through chem lab side by side with me all semester. Yay being done with Chem lab! Yay celebrating before we were done by making cake together! Cooking with AN was great, for one thing I did not have to go running to the computer every two seconds to check the ingredients or how much to measure. For another thing, I only had to do half (or less than half) the work because I had the excuse of taking pictures while making her do things. Huzzah.

     Making the chocolate cake involved some luck. It required coffee, we magically found packets of instant coffee in a random plastic bag in our cabinet (and by magically I mean because my roommate had left them there, but I think there are enough that she won't miss one - sorry AT!). It also required parchment paper rounds on the bottom of the pans before baking - and DL had bought parchment paper before he left! I guess I will use parchment paper as long as I didn't have to buy it...oh miserly me. It does make me less anxious about the cake coming out of the pan alright. 

     And are you looking at the cake we made? It smelled so delicious and chocolatey. It came out of the pan like butter. And, best of all, it was one of the most supremely moist cakes I have ever seen. It was a good thing there were a couple of crumbs in the pan because I really needed to eat some of this cake as soon as it came out of the oven. Coffee and chocolate really work amazingly together because the coffee heightens the chocolate flavor and makes it so much deeper. I cannot wait to try this cake, why oh why must I wait....oh obligations. So, I'm going to post the link to Joy's recipe (if you want to make her double layer chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream which looks Delicious) today, and when I write the post about putting together my cake I will post the recipe for the one layer I made. We are almost there!

Double Chocolate Devil's Food with Fresh Raspberries
From Joy the Baker