A Devilish Cake for an Evil Cake Lady

Yes, people, on Tuesday May 27 I officially become a year older. To celebrate (and/or distract myself from the fact that I am older), I invited a few friends to try out a fondue restaurant, and to gild the lily, I baked Dorie Greenspan's Devils Food White Out Cake. Seemed the most appropriate cake for Evil Cake Lady's birthday celebrations.

Also, this cake is the most recent project of the Lazy Bakers, No Rules Club. The club consists of me, Melinda, the Breadbasketcase, and Pinknest. Melinda, the unofficial club president, has also invited her friend Jeanette, who doesn't have a blog, to bake along. We hope Jeanette sends Melinda some photos and a recap, so that Melinda can post that on her blog. We all wanted to bake together (even though none of us live near each other--or even have met each other in real life), but we didn't want rules and stipulations and deadlines. Hence, Lazy Bakers and No Rules. Melinda is really the one who started this whole thing--that's why I've made her the unofficial president.

May 24, 2008
Name of cake: Devil's Food White Out Cake
Occasion: ECL Turns 35, and the Lazy Bakers' bake-along
Constituents: Three layers triple chocolate devil's food cake, filled and frosted with marshmallow fluff, decorated with the cake crumbs from the fourth layer of cake

this had better be it!

Like BBC, I had to go out and buy 8 inch cake pans. BBC ended up at Williams-Sonoma buying gold plated cake pans that set her back $18.95 per pan...not what I wanted to do. So on Saturday (yes, the day of the party) I headed out to the Decorette store after my massage to buy a couple of cake pans. There was much confusion at the store concerning the cake pans that I wanted to buy--apparently they just had a cake decorating class--the wedding cake version--and all the students cleaned the store out of 8 inch cake pans. After about an hour of being there and talking to 3 different people, I finally got them to call the Tigard store to see if they had two 8 inch cake pans they could set aside for me. And one hour after that, I was back home with two 8 inch cake pans, a falafel sandwich for me, and some milk for the cake.

Phew!

The night before I had begun my mise-en-place for this cake, so the baking part of this cake went fairly smoothly. There are a lot of ingredients to assemble and add to the cake at certain times which seems so fussy to me. I would like to understand why there are so many ingredients--why baking soda AND baking powder? Why melted chocolate AND cocoa powder? Why brown sugar AND regular sugar? Why milk AND boiling water? And why boiling water--aren't we just melting the butter when we add that? Dorie Greenspan is awesome, but she isn't as interested in giving us the whys as is the RLB. And I admit it, I like the whys.

The cakes baked up nice without much mishap. As they cooled on the racks, I cleaned up the kitchen and got ready to make the frosting.

The frosting, Dorie's version of Seven Minute Frosting, took forever to come together. Dorie's recipe requires that you cook a sugar syrup (plus the cream of tartar) on the stove while your egg whites wait patiently in the KitchenAid. The last time I made this addictive frosting, I used Martha's recipe and she has you cook the eggs, sugar, and water over the stove together. Dorie's way seems like it would be easier, but it was more like a twenty to twenty-five minute frosting. And hence my roommate and I were 40 minutes late for our dinner reservations, and the last ones to arrive at my party! Pretty typical.

Cake assembly was easy and fun--this is a great frosting as it is billowy, fluffy, and sticky. Easy to get on the cake and make look pretty.

Our server at the restaurant kindly whisked my cake in the cake carrier to their cooler, where it waited patiently for us to finish dipping all sorts of things into two little pots of stuff--cheese, broth, chocolate and caramel. When our server brought out our cake (which I had them take out early so that it would come up to room temperature), she brought us a little box of white candles! We stopped at four candles (we didn't want to melt the cake with 35 candles' worth of BTUs), and my peeps sang me happy birthday--how sweet!

By this time, the five of us had eaten quite a bit, and even though we cut small slices of cake, it was hard to finish. However, it is a good cake, with a moist and very light crumb when at room temperature, and the marshmallow frosting is a nice, light, and surprisingly, not too sweet adornment for the very chocolaty cake. For the sugars I used light muscovado and golden baker's and it gave the cake a nice, flowery, molasses and caramel tone.

just in case you didn't get enough cheese
and that is my lip ring, not a hole in my teeth

To be honest, I am not a fan of the chocolate chips in the cake, but most people seem to enjoy it. I had a piece tonight with some friends who could not make it to dinner, and the cake was still cold from the refrigerator. This left the cake pleasantly dense and fudgy, and the frosting even better. Either way, a good cake indeed!

Melinda, the dedicated person that she is, typed up the entire recipe, which is no small feat. Click here to read about her cake, which took a village to eat, and see the recipe.

Breadbasketcase, currently romping around Australia and New Zealand (say hi to the sheep!), braved this very complicated-looking recipe and made a great cake for mother's day. Click here to read about her first project with the Lazy Bakers, and to see her gold plated cake pans!