I haven’t made a lot of headway in writing contests or sending my stories to magazines, and I’m behind in my CampNano word count, so I decided to let off a little stress and bake. At first it was just going to be a cake with some frosting. It went from that to buttercream from scratch for the frosting, to, wellll, I have fondant so I may as well use it 🙂
The Cake:
I mixed a red velvet recipe with a chocolate cake recipe to some pretty tasty ends.
You need:
2 cups all-purpose flour 1 1/2 cups sugar 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon salt 3/4 cups unsweetened cocoa powder 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil 1 cup buttermilk, at room temperature 2 large eggs, at room temperature 1 teaspoon espresso powder 1 teaspoon white distilled vinegar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Then 3 circular 9 inch pans and vegetable oil and floor to line the pans.
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Mix the dry ingredients then put in the wet ones, mix with spoon or electric mixer until smooth.
Evenly pour the batter into 3 pans (grease and floor them first 🙂
Cook for 15 minutes and then rotate halfway around, cook for another 10 minutes or until a fork can go in and be pulled out clean.
Take the cakes out of the oven to cool and once cooled, pop them out of the pans, very carefully so they don’t lose chunks.
The Frosting:
As Max Black said, buttercream’s a bitch (and if you don’t watch 2 Broke Girls, well, you should, they’re hilarious 🙂
You will need:
1½ cups butter (3 sticks), softened 1 cup unsweetened cocoa 5 cups confectioner’s sugar ½ cup milk 2 teaspoons vanilla extract ½ teaspoon espresso powder
And an electric mixer and bowl, obviously 🙂
Directions:
When the recipe says softened butter, it means it. Do not melt it! Leave it on the counter for a bit, maybe while you’re doing the cake, but don’t pop it in the microwave unless you’re sure yours won’t melt any parts of it.
Once it’s soft-ish, I chop mine up so it’s easier to work with, then take the beaters to it on high. It’s going to clog up the mixer probably, just keep working the butter out and working it over. I lost at least a forth of a cup to the counter and my computer from the butter flying out. (Yes, my poor computer is so abused it’s probably looking for computer shelters to get away from me 🙂
Mix in the cocoa powder. Be careful, as the mixer stirs it up, you may inhale cocoa. I have brown lung right now.
Then put in one cup of the powdered sugar and one tablespoon of milk and mix. Repeat five times, so you get all five cups of sugar in there, add in the espresso powder and vanilla extract. Keep beating, make sure it’s smooth and mixed.
Once it’s all mixed together and smoothed into the frosting consistency, frost the cake.
Put the first layer of cake down, frost the top, put on the second layer, frost the top, put on the third and frost all around. I had a ton of frosting left even after being pretty generous with it. I covered it and put it in the fridge, and will let you know if it keeps.
After that, for some reason I just didn’t feel done, so I pulled out the fondant.
The Decoration:
Basically with fondant, you work and kneed it like play-doh, roll it out with a pin and put it on over the buttercream. It’s supposed to be easily smoothed out. I still have not figured out how to do that, so mine had some breaks and lumps and I just tried to cover them or work them in as I went.
I put on silver sparkly stuff I had left over from my boyfriend’s camera cake, and smoothed that over to make it silver. Then I just started playing with the rest of the fondant like it really was play-doh and made designs and flowers and stuck them on. Pulled out the gel writers and put some of that on.
I don’t think fondant tastes great and neither does my boyfriend, so we’ll probably just peel that off to eat the pieces of cake, but it looks pretty cool, huh?
Comments