Uber-Chocolate Father's Day Cake

My dad has been requesting a salted dark chocolate cake for a while now, so I decided to whip one up for Father's Day (what better occasion?).  Sweetapolita, as always, provided a beautiful recipe  that I shrunk and barely modified.  When (not if!) I make this again, I'd love to throw in some of the salted caramel buttercream in the middle to lighten everything up.  As it was, this was a big, gorgeous, totally delicious brick of a cake, with enough chocolate to kill a lesser human.  Dad loved it.  (This one also gave me an excuse to buy some fancy sea salt flakes, which were delicious and I'm going to put them in everything now.  I only wish I'd studded them around the sides of the cake as well as the top, to spread the flavor around!)

6" chocolate fudge cake with super-chocolate fudge frosting and sea salt flakes

A Cake for my Mom

I have a totally fantastic mom, you guys.

Here she is in circa 1982, looking fly.

Here we are last weekend, geeking out at Phantom of the Opera.

She is great in every way and I try and remember that every day, but of course on Mother's Day I try and do a little extra.  Every year we go to a local garden center and buy plants--sometimes they make it, sometimes they don't, I'd like to think we have a little bit better than 50% mortality rate but nobody's really keeping track.  This year we went a few weeks early so she could get the plant of her choice, which was a good decision because this weekend is mostly 100% rain.

This year, of course, I am celebrating All The Things with cake, and this is no exception.  I made her a wee ladylike cake with some piped flower-type things for her sugary enjoyment:

You would not believe how many people at Trader Joe's were buying flowers. 

I love it when the little cakes fit in the little boxes.

What we have here: the world's shortest two-layer 6" Earl Grey Tea cake (adapted from Better Homes and Gardens via Sprinkle Bakes) with honey vanilla Swiss Buttercream frosting (which is just a standard Swiss Meringue Buttercream with less sugar at the beginning and some honey added at the end).  It was a little too short to do the roses all around the side but I like how it turned out with a wreath of the roses on top and some other random little piped bits scattered around.

I haven't tasted it yet but it did make the kitchen smell AMAZING, so there's that.

Edit: good cake!  The tea flavor came through nicely and I'll definitely use the base to experiment with other steeped flavors in the future.  Here's one more picture:

Spring Cake on a Whim

So here's how things go with me.

I see something--in this case, Sprinkle Bakes' really lovely Speckled Egg Malted Milk Cake:

Complete with phyllo nest.  Fancy!

...and I have to make it.  The cake is a play off malted milk eggs, which as it turns out are HELLA DIFFICULT to locate two days before Easter.  Learn from my mistakes, kids.

Observe: our cake template.  Someday I'll figure out how to cover a cake in a crunchy candy shell.

Didn't have an occasion handy for making such a thing, and it's a lot weirder to bring an entire huge cake to the office than it is a plate of cookies or something, so I offered it up to Claire's family for their Easter get-together.  They accepted, and then her mom invited me to come along with the cake.  Can't say no to that.

I ended up malt-ing Smitten Kitchen's vanilla buttermilk cake recipe (my go-to) via a half cup of malted milk powder, which is pretty handy stuff.  Had to get some chocolate in there somewhere so I used a thin layer of ganache between the layers instead of frosting.  

Obviously, the best part of making this thing is speckling it--you make a paint with vanilla and cocoa and flick it onto your cake with a brush.  Since I figured this would make a huge mess I made a splatter zone with a beach towel, a hammer, and a couple nails.

I think it worked--I haven't found any spots on the wall.  Yet.

I want to do this to every cake I make, it's so much fun in a way that only terribly messy things can be.  Final result?

Obviously I had to stick a bunch of candy in this thing, you know me.

This ended up being a pretty sizable cake--three 8" layers plus frosting and filling.  Obviously this falls into the category of non-problems, but I'm going to need to source some bigger cake boxes.

Other cakes of 2013

Bridal shower cake for a White Shower for Melissa, made in collaboration with our friend Claire, who delivered and assembled it like a badass.

Lemon cake, lemon curd, vanilla buttercream.

(Flower and ribbon both 100% inedible, please do not eat.)

Giant Little Debbie cake for my dad for Father's Day. 

Chocolate cake, meringue filling (mysteriously disappeared, whoops), chocolate frosting, ganache, white chocolate swirl.

(As you can see, stuck to the sides of the box like crazy, for maximum Little Debbie-esque realness.)

Birthday cake for Lauren, with orbiting satellite cupcakes.

Chocolate Octoberfest cake with brown sugar buttercream, candied pecans, and sprinkles.

Birthday cake for my brother.

Three layers of spicy carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and hand-picked red sprinkles from my large collection of multi-colored sprinkles.

Cake for my mom's surprise birthday party.

Vanilla buttermilk cake with malted vanilla buttercream and Whoppers.  Frosting was tinted a totally uncooperative shade of purple which refused to photograph correctly, but the cake (and the party) were both pretty good.