the (mis)adventures of jenna

For my birthday I got the America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book from Joey’s parents.  (I was so excited when I opened the package that I gave the book a hug.)  After I read pretty much the entire thing, I decided that my the first recipe I would try had to be the Chocolate Blackout Cake.  It looked amazing.

We had friends coming over on Monday night (hi!) and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to be able to bake up some chocolate layer cake goodness.  I can’t justify baking a cake of this magnitude for just Joey and I…we’d probably explode before the cake was even half gone.

I got up at 8:00 on Monday morning and began making the pudding, which would eventually become the filling in between the three layers, and the “frosting” for the cake.  It needed to cool for four hours, so I set it in the fridge about 8:30 and there it sat until 4:00 when I the cake layers had finally cooled.

The directions called for me to cut the two layers in half.  Three of the four layers would be for the actual cake, and one would be crumbled up into little chocolatey bits, which I would later press all over the top and sides of the pudding-frosted cake.

My cake was so moist, though, that it was hard to crumble the leftover layer into pieces as small as I had envisioned.  I decided this was not an altogether bad problem; I’d rather have a soft and delicious cake and have larger chocolate crumbs on the outside than a dry cake and perfectly fine crumbs.

After I crumbled up the extra layer, I had to stir the pudding which had been resting in my fridge for hours.

It was hard.

But after about twenty good stirs it finally got to a workable consistency again.  (All the while, Joey was over my shoulder snapping pictures and begging for samples.)

I puddinged the first layer.

Then I had to place the second layer on the first.  It’s harder than it looks.

YUM.

Layer #2 frosted just as easily as the first one.

When I put Layer #3 on, though, I was just a little bit kattywampus…and the cake started to look like the Leaning Tower of Piza.  I tried to fix it, but Layer #3 started to rip.  I decided I’d just fix it with frosting.

And so I did.

The directions called for me to frost the top…

and the sides…

Once I was finished frosting, I felt compelled to lick my frosting spatula.  It was actually pretty good, and I don’t really like pudding.

This is the part where I wished the crumbs had been a little bit more delicate, but I wasn’t really going to complain at this point.  They were so, so delicate and moist.

It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be to get those little things to stick to the pudding.  But I survived.

I want to eat it all!

OKfine, I’ll share.  If you’re nice.

The finished product looked quite respectable I’d say.  For something I made, that is.

I want to go home right now and eat my cake.