Birthday and Shower Cakes

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that Chet and Larry both had birthdays during February. Chet wanted a jam cake for his birthday, so I made my first jam cake ever. Larry, however, chose the Cocoa-Buttermilk Birthday Cake (from Baking: From My Home to Yours) for his birthday treat. It was gooood...
For Larry's birthday, I made this cake as Dorie specifies in her recipe...using two 9-inch round pans. I love layer cakes. The recipe is so very simple, but I think my cakes got a little bit too dry. I did leave them in the oven a little longer than the recipe said, but that's because my toothpick kept coming out gooey, and the middles weren't "springy," they were soupy!

The chocolate malt buttercream is what made the cake though. In my opinion, the cake is really just a vehicle for the frosting. This was the one frosting recipe which made a little too much frosting. I wasn't stretching to be able to fill and frost the cake. Which was wonderful because I got to eat the remainder of the icing with a spoon. Oh, yes I did.

See how dense the cake was? A tad dry, but yummy nonetheless. We decided that the frosting tastes a lot like brownie batter. Yum! I couldn't really detect the malt flavor, but it was the best chocolate frosting I've ever made!

I also made this cake for a wedding shower for David's cousin's fiancee, Mary Beth. For the shower, I made the cake in a 9x13-inch pan, and again...the cake was dry! I thought it was too dry, but I got several compliments on the cake. The icing was still delicious, though! The cake is good too, but I just need to be confident enough to take the cake out sooner, without being concerned that it's still gooey in the middle. We all remember the brownie fiasco, right?

If you need a good chocolate cake recipe, give this one a try. You can find the recipe here. You can find the delicious chocolate malt buttercream recipe there, too. It's a little labor intensive, but totally worth it!