birthday cake

[redbird]

I made cattitude a chocolate birthday cake, with a layer of chocolate on top, at his request. This is something like the birthday cake he often asked for as a child.

The basic cake recipe I'm using is relatively light -- it's the Hershey's black magic chocolate cake, which is fairly easy to make and east to make non-dairy -- with semi-sweet chocolate chips melted on top.

The first time I tried this, the chocolate chips all sank to the bottom and melted onto the pan. This time, I took the cake out of the oven about 2/3 of the way through baking it, put the chips on, and then put it back. At that stage in the baking, the center of the cake is lower than the edges, and the chips rolled towards the center.

When the cake was done and I took it out, I used a knife to spread the melted chocolate a bit more evenly; cattitude said it's better with discrete chips, so I can skip that step whenever I next make this.

Because this was an experiment, I baked the cake in two pans, and put chocolate chips on only one, so I could count on having a good cake.

Comments

[kareina]

Did you stack them like a layer cake?

[redbird]

No, I treated them as two separate cakes, not being sure how the chocolate chips would work. Next time I'm going to try again to scatter chips on top, but not spread the melted chocolate the way I did this time, and probably wait until the cake is almost finished before adding the chocolate chips.

More experimentation is likely. We're trying to reproduce a cake cattitude's mother used to make. Unfortunately, he didn't ask her for the details/process of when the chips went in. A denser cake would probably work better, but this one is relatively easy, and there's no way I was experimenting with anything new and complicated right now.