Seeing as how J’s always bugging me to make her cupcakes, i decided that there was no better way to welcome her home (if only for the month which is way too short) than making her a cupcake- one so huge it could last her the entire month if she rationed it out properly.
The plan, put together after a quick rummage around the kitchen to see what i had on hand, was to bake two cakes- a vanilla cake in a dome shaped stainless steel bowl and a chocolate fudge cake in a springform pan- frost them with chocolate ganache and vanilla silk meringue buttercream respectively, put the chocolate cake on top of the vanilla one and top it off with a handmade rose.
Easy right?
Well, to anyone who has been reading this space for a reasonable amount of time, it wouldn’t come as much of a surprise that things didn’t quite go according to plan.
For starters, i should have chosen a sturdier chocolate cake, given that it was going to be stack on top of a smaller cake. No more than mere seconds after i lifted the cake off the wire rack to be gingerly placed on top of the frosted vanilla cake, huge cracks started to form in numerous parts of the cake.
It’s okay, i thought, i would just place it on top of the cake as planned, frost it as quickly as i can and chuck it all into the fridge and hopefully it will all work out. Don’t you just love my naive optimism?
No prizes for guessing what happened next- the chocolate cake, inspite of sitting on top of a generous amount of frosting which i had hopes would help keep the cake in place while i frosted it, started to make its way into descent fairly quickly. The cake had broken into several pieces, all of which were threatening to slide off if i didn’t act quickly.
After numerous attempts to hold them all together using wooden skewers and a lot of swearing, i gave up. There was no way that cake could stay on top of the first tier. So i did the only thing i could think of doing (well, one of two things actually- the other being gorging myself silly on the cake and baking a sturdier chocolate cake)- i took the cake off, put it into a buttered and line springform pan, poured all the silk meringue frosting i had, mashed it all up together and put the pan in the freezer.
Two hours later, i had myself a chocolate truffle cake so solid i had no trouble easing it out of the pan and onto the vanilla cake. As the truffle cake was frozen solid, frosting it with the white chocolate buttercream GT helped whip up was quite a breeze. Thank goodness it all worked out.
I was pretty pleased with how it looked, despite GT and my brother both saying it looked like a huge mushroom.
Oh well, i guess there’s just no pleasing everyone.
