Birthday Cake Part 1 - Chocolate

This weekend is my son's 5th birthday and I was just going to buy his cake instead of making one, since I'm still a beginner at cake decorating. So, a few weeks ago he asked me to make his cake. We decided what he wanted and now I'm in the process of making it. It is going to be 3 tiered with different flavors on each layer. It will be green with camo and G.I. Joes all around it. The bottom will be a 10" chocolate cake, that's what today's blog is all about.

Now before I get started, did you see the eggs in that picture? My husband is helping me with a few of the pics, and he decided to stack the eggs. Pretty nifty, and scary I thought they'd collapse, but they made it through. As for the rest of the pics on here through this particular entry, I decided to try out a few shots, and I'm no photographer!

Ok, cake! I'm using the (slightly) modified version of the Chocolate-Chocolate Cake found on Wilton.com.

Ingredients:

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
¾ cup butter

1 ½ cups sugar

3 eggs

2 tsp vanilla

2 ½ cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

½ t salt

1 ½ cups water

- Preheat your oven to 350 degrees

- Spray pan with Baker's Joy or a similar product. (Wilton says use vegetable spray, but I think that's a little
gross for cake also this spray is so much easier than greasing and flouring)

- Melt chocolate chips (I use Ghirardelli) and butter in the microwave stirring in 30 second intervals. You can also do this on the stove in a double broiler or a pot. If you use a pot you need to constantly stir because chocolate burns very easily.

- After it's nice and melted you want to keep stirring until it's smooth. Pour that into your mixer along with your sugar and beat it on low/medium low until it's nice and blended.


(see not the best of pictures)

- After you get it nice and smooth you'll add your eggs, one at a time, vanilla (now the

picture above has clear vanilla, but you can use any kind), baking soda, 1/2 cup of flour and salt. Mix well

- Add remaining flour and water then mix it up nice and smooth.

- Pour into you preferred pan. For this cake I am using a 10" round pan. Just to note, I'm using a Wilton pan and those tend to stick right in the middle. I've found putting some extra spray onto the center of the pan helps with the sticking.

- Cook for 40 minutes or until you can stick a toothpick in the center of the cake and it comes out clean. Let cool.


Since I'm using fondant, I'll just make a filler (recipe below). Not spreading it all over, just in between the layers and I'll cut the dome off of the cake so it is nice and flat. (I'll post the finished picture on the last post of this series).



This simple chocolate icing is simple and quick to make

Ingredients:

1 (14 oz) can condensed milk

1 Tbsp water

1/8 tsp salt

2 oz worth of squares semi sweet chocolate

1/2 tsp vanilla

In pot mix milk, water, salt and chocolate (again I use Ghirardelli there is a notable difference, though it's more expensive than Baker's Chocolate. These squares are also 1/2 oz instead of 1 oz)

Heat and stir constantly (remember chocolate burns very easily) until thick. Remove from heat. Cool then stir in vanilla.

Now it's ready to be used as filling in the bottom layer of the cake!