Let there be cake!

Hello! Welcome to my trial and error blog. I feel the need to develop my baking abilities, so why not blog about it? Along with teaching myself new baking techniques, I also work full time, go to school part time, and do Irish dancing which takes up more time than you'd think :). So, for now, my goal is at least one "culinary masterpiece" a week. They might not always be pretty, and they might not always be good, but hopefully I will learn something from my experiences and feed a few loved ones along the way.

For my first project I decided to try my hand at a chocolate truffle cake. I LOVE the book I got the recipe from.

The thing I love most about this book is that every recipe has at least one picture of the finished product. This won't be the last time I try something out of it.

I love making homemade cake. It's not that it tastes extraordinarily better than cake out of a box, but there's the satisfaction of knowing you made that puppy from scratch, and this one was an especially grand feeling since it called for three layers rather than two.

Making all the elements of the cake was relatively easy.

Oh man, the truffle tasted so yummy! I'm signing up for a truffle class at a bakeshop, with my friend Kim, and I cannot wait now!

The not so relatively easy part for me, was assembling and decorating the cake. There are a couple of things I learned:

#1. I need to get some cake boards. Now friends, I dropped out of culinary school before I learned about the cake making process (I can make Challah though!) and so I've never really known about cake boards until now. I think we will become very close from now on.

(This is about the time I realized how not fun it was going to be when it came time to move the cake from the rack to the serving plate.)

And lesson #2.
I need a cake wheel, and HOW!

How much easier would this have been with a cake wheel?!?! I don't want to think about that right now...

The bottom line is, it's the beginning of March and I already have items for a Christmas list that I can't wait until Christmas to get. Mike, are you paying attention?

Anyways, after some weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, I ended up with this:

That's truffle piped around the outside...so good...

Special thanks to my husband, Mike, for taking the pictures. And also thanks to Pete, our pill of a dog, for eating chocolate off the floor of the kitchen and making himself sick.



As a side note, the next day as Mike was taking a nap and I was busy in the kitchen making cookies for my co-workers, Pete decided to help out again by doing this:

The stuffing, at one point in its existence, used to be inside that stupid pig that is supposed to be tougher than nails.