Friday, May 10, 2013

The FrankenCake - A Vanilla Cream-Filled Chocolate Cake for "Two"

It's about time for a Valentine's Day post right? Let's just site the frenzied panic of job applications, final papers, exams, and the omnipresent graduation ceremony that looms not too far away as a few of the reasons for the complete lack of cooking in my life. Though catching up on the entire last fours seasons of Fringe may be another.

What have you missed? Let's see. Countless boxes of pasta. And I only say countless because it is actually less shameful than admitting the real number of boxes I have consumed. Aside from discovering the wonders of squash and carrot veggie pasta, however, only two major culinary events have occurred in my life since my last post.

A) Roasted Asparagus is the only vegetable (and/or food) that should ever be consumed because it is just that delicious.

and

B) The possible discovery of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe of all time (as I'm sure my housemates wouldn't mind attesting to)

But let's save that for the next blog post. For now we turn to the FrankenCake.

When you are an art history major, sometimes you can only describe things with art lingo. Clearly I've studied too many Italian Renaissance Villa gardens this semester because the only word I can come up with to describe this cake is Grotesque.

Remember that time (back with those fudge brownies) when I told you not to be a greedy bear and let your brownies cool for an hour, so that the whole top half doesn't fall off when you flip over the tin? Apparently that rule about letting your cakes cool completely before frosting them holds the same merit.


But despite being a lopsided, melty, oozing mess that broke all laws of physics by standing as long as it did, the cake was not only insanely fun to make, but just ridiculously hilarious to attempt to eat. And, as you can probably tell, this "cake for two" could feed an army.

While the FrankenCake was really good, I think I would recreate each component more to my tastes next time. The mayonnaise addition was a little too overpowering, and I wasn't a huge fan of the gelatin based cream filling. I think a classic chocolate cake with a butter cream filling would have been delicious smothered in the ganache avalanche.


For the recipe  see: http://sweetapolita.com/2013/02/vanilla-cream-filled-double-chocolate-cake-for-two/
 It even looks like a little monster doesn't it?




If you actually wait for your cakes to cool, you will have gorgeous little puffs of white filling separating each layer like a pillow of clouds.


Happy Valentine's Day!