My Mom is turning 65 in a few weeks and I offered to make the cake. The only instruction I was given was: "chocolate". I thought there were a lot of places I could go with that so I started brainstorming ideas. One of my favourite ways to fancy up a cake is to add chocolate bars to it. One of Mom's favourites is Terry's Chocolate Orange, so I decided I would try making a chocolate orange cake. As I recently learned that it's good for me to try out new recipes, I spent much of Sunday fooling around in the kitchen with a chocolate orange cake.
The cake was super fun to bake and decorate, and because I was just making it for practice there was no stress while making it. I made a three layer cake that was iced mainly with whipped chocolate icing and had orange frosting between the layers and on the top.
This is what it looked like:
I was really happy with how the cake looked and it was actually pretty easy to decorate. I texted this picture to Mom and this was the response I got:
She is the sweetest, eh?
The look of the cake was what I wanted and I will definitely use some of the same decorative elements in the final version. The only thing that has to change is the taste. Turns out I went a little overboard with the orange extract that was added to the icing. So much so that my mouth actually tingled when I ate it. Whoops! It's still edible, but the chocolate orange balance just wasn't right. Dare I say, it was too much of a good thing.
But this is why I'm practicing. And I've learned a new baking rule: easy on the extract!
I still have a few weeks to figure out what cake I'll take to her birthday, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to adhere more to her initial instruction and just go with chocolate.
The cake was super fun to bake and decorate, and because I was just making it for practice there was no stress while making it. I made a three layer cake that was iced mainly with whipped chocolate icing and had orange frosting between the layers and on the top.
This is what it looked like:
I was really happy with how the cake looked and it was actually pretty easy to decorate. I texted this picture to Mom and this was the response I got:
She is the sweetest, eh?
The look of the cake was what I wanted and I will definitely use some of the same decorative elements in the final version. The only thing that has to change is the taste. Turns out I went a little overboard with the orange extract that was added to the icing. So much so that my mouth actually tingled when I ate it. Whoops! It's still edible, but the chocolate orange balance just wasn't right. Dare I say, it was too much of a good thing.
But this is why I'm practicing. And I've learned a new baking rule: easy on the extract!
I still have a few weeks to figure out what cake I'll take to her birthday, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to adhere more to her initial instruction and just go with chocolate.
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Cake testing is the best kind of testing! :)
ReplyDeleteIt really is a lot of fun! :)
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