This cake was so easy (for the most part). I used a great tutorial on Love Stitched you can find here. It was written by another blogger Baking With Blondie who has some incredible recipes to check out!
I simply made to 9″ round cakes using spring form pans. I was sure to grease and flour them so the cakes popped right out. To grease and flour a pan just wipe butter on the pan with a paper towel or spray some non stick spray on the pan. Add a few teaspoons of flour into the pan and roll it around until the pan is lightly coated.
I let them cool overnight. Then leveled them with a sharp serrated knife. Next I flipped one cake upside down on top the other so the two leveled (cut) tops were in the middle – touching. Then I cut a yin-yang shape through the middle just like Love Stitched instructed me to.
At this point one of the cakes has to be flipped upside down to make the mustache shape.
The next part was the only somewhat tricky or frustrating part. The tutorial I used told you to do a crumb coating of frosting. That just means it is okay that it is all lumpy and crumbs come off into the frosting as you coat it with a thick layer. One of my problems here was I used a frosting that had chocolate chips in it. I love the taste, but it was hard to frost with. (Side note – I think that even with a regular frosting the crumb coating would have been the hardest steps.)
I also loved Love Stitched’s idea to cover a piece of cardboard with white paper to serve the cake on! I didn’t have either of those things, but I covered a cooling rack, that was long enough for the cake, with brown paper and it was great! Plus once I put it on the rack to frost I used aluminum foil (long narrow strips) underneath the edges so that when I was done frosting I could just slide them out and the brown paper would be clean and look nice as a serving platter.
Then because I hadn’t frozen the cake (which my husband and I usually do when frosting cakes – especially ones that have to be cut down to make a shape) the inside part where we had cut the yin-yang line through the middle really was hard to frost. At times too much of the cake was coming off into the frosting. I could see I was at risk of loosing some of the shape so this is when I stopped and decided to refrigerate – even without all the frosting. I didn’t want to compromise the shape too much.
In this picture you can see the crumb coating and how the back side (where I had cut) was much harder to frost and started to lose its shape.
After cooling it was easier to finish crumb coating. I stuck it back in again before using the final – dark cocoa powder frosting. I agree with the other tutorial that using dark cocoa powder really made the cake look GREAT. It added depth and for me went with my black and yellow theme much better.
Resist the urge to wipe any stray chocolate off of the tray though. 🙂 It’s not very forgiving!
Here is a great recipe for chocolate cake.
One for cocoa buttercream frosting too.
Baking with Blondie is a blog I will now be checking first for baking (and cooking) tips and recipes. Hope you will too!
Baking with Blondie is a blog I will now be checking first for baking (and cooking) tips and recipes. Hope you will too!
Although you can make this with 2 box cakes (be sure to always follow the mixing instructions – 1 minute on slow and 2 minutes on fast for the best results) and 4 tubs of frosting. (Two milk chocolate and 2 dark cocoa.)
In the end the cake was a huge hit.
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