Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve we woke up late . . .

. . . played a game of Cacassone and two rounds of Ten Days in Europe . . .


. . . made sweet potato rolls (Sophie and Calvin helped) . . .


. . . did a lot of dishes . . .


. . . wore Santa hats and Christmas themed aprons . . .


. . . and I made this. Here is my review if anyone wants to know. This is the cake featured on the cover of Bon Appetite in December. Susan brought the magazine over to my house and I decided I had to make it for Christmas Eve this year. If you read the recipe, you will discover that there is an insane amount of chocolate in the cake. I do not really care for peppermint in my cakes, so I substituted orange extract for the peppermint.

The cake is delicious! I under baked the cakes a bit and the layers were really moist and chocolaty. The bittersweet ganache is about the richest thing I have ever made and it does not take 1/2 hour to bring it to room temperature - more like three hours. I became impatient and microwaved it a bit and it was perfect. The white chocolate cream filling is insanely delicious! I would definitely use it in other cakes. The outer frosting is - well, a disaster. It needs to be cooked about twice as long as the recipe calls for and even after beating the life out of it, the frosting had the consistency of marshmallow cream. It tastes really good, but I wanted to scoop it into a mug of hot cocoa and not on my cake! As it was, the frosting coated the cake in a shiny white glaze and then puddled at the bottom of the cake stand.

Here are the layers with the bittersweet ganache and the white chocolate cream fillings. At this point, I should have put a dowel in the cake to help keep it from falling over - it's really tall and slippery.


And here it is with the mashmallow cream icing.


And here it is cut. It was a huge hit - really, really rich and gorgeous. Susan had made cupcakes for the kids, but they all wanted cake instead, so we polished this whole thing off! Would I make it again? Not anytime soon. It is definitely a special occasion cake!