Every year my dad wants the same cake for his birthday: spice cake with caramel frosting. It is so good! I like to have different things every year. It's my one chance to get exactly what I want! This year, I wanted pumpkin cheesecake, and my mom came through with an amazing one.
Well, today is hubby's birthday. Currently, this is the only fall celebration I bake the cake for, so I always look forward to it. I love to bake! This year, hubby wanted black forest cake. Cherries are one of his favorite things. Now, I've never baked a black forest cake before, but I so enjoy trying new things in my baking, so I was excited!
These days, I very rarely follow a new recipe to the letter. I'm more of a try-it-and-see, work-with-what-I-have kind of girl. I couldn't find a recipe I liked for black forest cake that used a boxed mix, which I happened to have and wanted to use. So, I got out my Cake Mix Doctor cookbook. I just love this book! Every cake I've tried out of it is wonderful! I found a good chocolate cake recipe and started with that.
Now I doubt that it's good blogging etiquette to post a recipe from someone's cookbook on your site without permission, so I'll refrain. Let's just say that there was some combining of ingredients (including sour cream and chocolate chips - yum!), some mixing, some batter in pans, and some baking :) To try it, go get the book, it's worth it!
Here's the part where I deviate from the recipe. It called for baking in a bundt pan. But since this was going to be a black forest cake and needed layers (for filling. Cherry-and-Cool-Whip-goodness filling), I had to adjust a little. Turns out it worked just fine to put the batter in two round cake pans and bake at the same temp, for the same time. Except there was a little leftover batter.
Does anyone else immediately think cupcakes?! I always immediately think cupcakes when there's leftover anything in baking. So I made two round cakes and four cupcakes in cute pumpkin liners :)
When I went to the store and got the couple things I needed for this cake, I really didn't think about the maraschino cherries being too liquidy (yep, liquidy. That's a word, right?) to work well for the filling. I'm not sure what happened there, because I thought about it when I planned out the cake and was going to get cherry pie filling, too, so it would have lots of cherry flavor, but that didn't happen. So here's what did happen. I took most of the juice from the jar of cherries and mixed it in a bowl with some of the Cool Whip, as much as I thought I might need for the filling. I figured any extra could be the icing on the cupcakes. It mixed beautifully and really tasted like cherry!
Then I just assembled the layers with the cherry Cool Whip and some cherries in between, frosted with lots more Cool Whip, and garnished with a few cherries. It. Was. Awesome. Seriously, this was a good cake!
So there's my first baking post! And happy birthday to my dearest love :)
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