Monday, December 13, 2004

Triple Chocolate Layer Cake


In my opinion, this is really more of a quadruple chocolate layer cake. This is a chocolate cake (1) with mini semisweet chocolate chips in it (2) filled with a milk chocolate mousse (3) and covered in a bittersweet chocolate glaze(4).
I made it yesterday to take to work this morning, as it was a coworker's birthday and I usually find the store bought cakes we end up with to be somewhat lacking. Don't get me wrong, I love a cake from a good bakery, but the last carrot cake we had appeared to be covered in a nearly inedible cheese-flavoured plastic substance. Tragic, really. I love carrot cake.... But back to my cake. Incredibly good and chocolatey.
Here's a photo of the interior, albeit a slightly blurry one:


It received rave reviews, as we all (rather unhealthily, I might add) had pieces well before lunchtime.
I used a recipe from epicurious.com, but left out the peppermint extract because though the original recipe appeals to me, I know several people who cannot stand the thought of chocolate and mint in the same dish. No ill effects came from the exclusion.
The recipe can be found here, though I will not repost it for brevity's sake:
Triple-Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Peppermint Filling.

My notes:
This cake was pretty easy to make, but time consuming. I made it a day ahead and stored it in the freezer over night without any problems. In fact, I would recommend storing it this way to keep everything firm. I used ScharffenBerger chocolate - a good use for it, because I don't really like it on it's own. I also slightly undercooked the cake (I would recommend one hour of baking at 375, rather then 350), but just scraped out the two or three tablespoonfuls of runny batter when I filled it, so no one was the wiser. Except all of you. Hmm.