can't sit still: for all you chocolate cake lovers

More birthdays = trying new recipes

Chocolate Chocolate Cake

After finally finding cake mixes in Taiwan, I've been excited to use one of the cake doctor's recipes. This recipe book is a guide to making any ordinary cake into an extraordinary cake! (The author probably uses that tag line somewhere but I don't care to find it. )

CAKE:

I sort of followed this recipe and it was delicious but many substitutions had to be made.

-Chocolate cake mix: I had to use the only vanilla cake mix we could find in Taiwan. I added a 1/4 cup of cocoa powder and a few extra tablespoons of sugar as a substitute.

-Sour cream: I had to use vanilla yogurt (can't find plain yogurt) because sour cream is ridiculously expensive in Taiwan.

-Instant chocolate pudding: I had to use non-instant egg custard pudding and added cocoa powder to make it chocolate.

FILLING:

Getting some tips from Martha, I made a buttercream filling for the center by following this recipe.

CHOCOLATE GLAZE:

I had to picky about which of the many online chocolate glazes I could choose from because of my lack of ingredients (cocoa powder and confectioner's sugar). But I lucked out because this recipe made a glaze that is similar to my mother's infamous boston cream pie chocolate glaze (a favorite).

A happy pseudo-birthday to Erin and Amy!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake

This is one decadent cake recipe. But after looking at the pictures and celebrating the birthday of a peanut butter lover, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to try this cake.

CAKE:

This cake gave me a few minor headaches in the wee hours of the morning. The batter is very runny and it never really set up well. The three separate cake layers stuck to the pan and all inverted when placed on a plate. It was my roommate Sunny who saved the 'look' by suggesting I serve the cake on a frisbee.

FROSTING:

The recipe calls for a lot of cream cheese and we don't have the budget to buy more than 8 oz. I ended up trying to compensate with more peanut butter. The frosting ended up looking like cookie dough (I in fact had too much of this 'frosting' so I added flour and made some candy pb cookies with the extra). To moisten the pb frosting, I added a cup of vanilla yogurt and a few tbsp. of milk.

GLAZE:

Looking at this cake you can already tell it's going to have a lot of flavor. I only did 1/2 of the amount of glaze that it called for because I only wanted it for decorating. Of course like all the others, I had to do all sorts of substituting to make up for the lack of ingredients.

-Semisweet chocolate chips: (the closest place to find those is 45 min. away at Costco), so I had to use their waxy, less flavorful chocolate baking chunks.

-Corn syrup: I substituted with liquid fructose flavoring.

-Half and half: I used this substitution recipe.

With all of these adaptions it didn't quite turn out like the original images. My glaze was more of a shell around the cake.

In aggregate, the cake was delicious but very intense. It needs ice cream or milk. It had a nice blend of different consistencies between the moist cake, creamy frosting and crisp shell. Peanut butter cups would have been nice to decorate with but when you don't have them, snicker bar chunks taste great too.