Spicy Chocolate Cake

Pinterest seems to have taken over any semblance of free time that I may have had. It's like StumbleUpon for people with ADHD.

But that does not make it a bad thing. If you actually go back to your board and find something that you truly want to create, then I think it is totally worth it.

Take this recipe. I found this pinned on Tuesday and had, had, had to make it. It originally came from this site and I can't seem to find a name to attribute it to. What you may notice if you click on that link is that the blog is in another language. According to Google Translator, it is Polish. Thank goodness Google has a translator.

You must make this cake.

If for no other reason than to smell it baking.

It is that divine.

Mix the yogurt, oil, vanilla and eggs and orange zest together in a bowl.

 In a separate bowl sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and cocoa. Add the sugar and salt, spice gingerbread spices.

 Don't know what gingerbread spices are? I didn't either. It is apparently a European thing because I went to two different grocery stores and no one had ever heard of them. Even the three little old ladies in the baking aisle. They were intrigued, though. So a quick Google search turned up a mix that sounded pretty good from food.com. I just added that mixture to the recipe below, but the site suggests adding it to pretty much everything so I might have to experiment with that.

Add the flour mixture slowly to the liquid mixture and then add in 1 cup of Coca Cola. The original recipe called for freshly brewed coffee. I didn't have any and I wasn't about to make any. I did have some Coke, so I substituted that in.

 Pour into prepared pans and bake for about 35 minutes.

 Layer and frost with the greatest cream cheese frosting ever created.

Now you may have noticed something a little bit different in the very first picture.

A few years ago, my kids received a giant pad of Christmas themed hidden picture pages. Every night for the past month, before going to bed, we complete a page. Hidden things are huge in my house. So this hidden Christmas tree cake fit in perfectly with our nightly routine.

Even better, this was super easy to achieve.While your layers are cooling, mix up any white or yellow cake. I used the Eggnog Cupcakes. You are going to use the same procedure that you would to make cake balls. If you have missed out on this craze, don't worry. I made them once and to be honest, I do not believe for one second that they are worth the trouble. Anyway, crumble up about a dozen cupcakes. If I were to plan ahead on this, I wouldn't use cupcakes. There are too many edges and they do not crumble well.

 Mix in about a half a cup of green tinted mascarpone cheese. I used about 40 drops of food coloring. I also did not use actual mascarpone. Our little grocery store does not carry it, but you can make your own or just substitute in cream cheese or even frosting. Mix this well to form a nice dough. About the consistency of play-doh.

 Turn one of your layers over so the bottom is facing up. To make a Christmas tree, you need to cut out a cone. This is a triangular circle, and I am pretty sure there is no more difficult shape to try to cut out of a cake layer. It helps to have some kind of pattern. You probably have a cup that will fit just right. Mine ended up being about 8 cm (3 inches) in diameter.

Slice in at an angle. 

 

It is better to go too shallow at first. You can always go in and make it steeper later.

 Remove the cone and smooth out the edges so you have a nice neat depression in the bottom of your cake.

Take a little piece of the green dough and form a cone that fits into your cut part.

Then form a pancake from the green dough that is a little bit bigger than your first one and press it down on top. 

 Repeat this step.

 Once more until the dough becomes even with the bottom of your cake layer. Flip this over onto your serving plate so the dough is on the bottom.

 Now you are going to make a cut out in the second layer that is a little smaller than the first. Mine ended up being about 6 cm (2 inches) in diameter.

 Repeat with the green dough.

 You will have quite a bit of dough left over. Make some cute little Christmas trees. Just form a tree from the dough. Take a pair of scissors and snip around to make it look like leaves.

 Sprinkle with powdered sugar because, you know, it is snowing.

 Layer and frost with the greatest cream cheese frosting ever created.

 When you cut into the cake, your little cones look just like a Christmas tree.

This was such a hit at supper time. I told The Kids that we had to find four Christmas trees. They found the first three on top immediately (my kids are so smart, you know) and were completely delighted when we cut into the cake to find the last one. I realize my tree isn't as pretty as it could have been, but to tell the truth, it came out so much better than I thought it would.

This really is a pretty simple cake to put together. I actually did it on a Tuesday night in a couple hours that included bake time. You could use any cake recipe, but I highly recommend you try this one at least once. It is super moist and the spices are to die for.

So go ahead, make a "fancy" cake for the holidays. Just try not to puff up too much with all the oohs and ahhs.


Click here for Printable Recipe


Spicy Chocolate Cake
1 and 3/4 cups flour
2 cups sugar
3/4 cup baking cocoa dark
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup plain yogurt
1/2 cup oil
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup coca cola
Zest of 1 orange
2-3 teaspoons of the gingerbread spices
Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and cocoa. Add the sugar and salt, spice gingerbread spices. In a separate bowl mix the yogurt, oil, vanilla and eggs and orange zest. For the wet ingredients gradually add the flour mixture. Blend, adding in coca cola. Mix only just combined. Pour into two prepared round cake pans. Bake about 35-40 minutes, until a knife comes out clean. After baking, wait 15-20 minutes before removing. Baked layers allowed to stand until completely cool.

20 Layer Cake

I cleaned my room yesterday. Woohoo! It was getting a bit ridiculous, if I do say so myself. I will, however, mention that a lot of the problem was kid stuff. Now that we finally have The Girl's room painted and put back together, she might be able to move out of mine :)

I found my latest issue of Taste of Home under my bed. Amazingly, I didn't sit down to read it until I had finished my room. I must have a fever or something.

I found a recipe for a Red Velvet Crepe Cake that just looked amazing. Jeff was off golfing with my nephew for his birthday, so I figured that was a good an excuse as any to bake a cake. That and I have been looking for a reason to make this frosting again. Yes, it's that good.

If I would have read the instructions before starting this, I might never have tried it. I was thinking I would bake a cake and slice the cake into layers.

I was wrong.

Gonna warn you here. This is not a relaxing cake to make. It's not difficult, it's just not something you walk away from. All in all it took me probably about an hour and a half to get it all put together. Make sure your counter tops are cleared of any clutter as you will need every inch of space available! You are going to make a lot of little cakes here.

Add 2 3/4 cups milk, 1 cup flour, 3 eggs, 3 egg yolks, 1/4 melted butter and 3 teaspoons vanilla to a red velvet cake mix and beat well. Isn't that gorgeous? I am officially in love with red velvet cake.

Pour 1/3 cup of the batter into a hot, lightly greased 8 inch skillet. The original recipe called for 1/4 cup, but I couldn't get it to spread out enough to coat the bottom of the pan. Also, if you have a pan with short sides, use that. I only had my regular skillet and it made it difficult to get the cooked cake out. Turns out they also make crepe pans. I may have to investigate that further.

**Actually, as an update to this...I have made this cake many times now, and one day it occurred to me that crepes are closely related to pancakes...that I make on the griddle. A griddle is perfect for these layers and greatly decreases the time it takes to make it!

It also says to tilt the pan until the batter all spreads out. That didn't work for me. I used the measuring cup to spread it around.

The batter is a little bit thicker than pancake batter, so it takes a little convincing to get it to coat the entire pan and even then I couldn't get it to spread out evenly.

Cook this until it starts to bubble and appear dry on the top, just like pancakes do. I cooked mine for a little over a minute. Flip it over and cook for about 20 seconds.

Now, if you have never made a crepe before (like me), your first few will not be pretty (unless you have a crepe pan, then you might luck out). It is not easy to flip those suckers. That's okay. The one on the left got eaten by The Kids because it was deemed too ugly to be a part of a cake. The one on the right isn't too pretty, but it was never noticed once it became covered in frosting and other borderline cakes.

Once you have all your batter converted into crepe cakes, start assembling the cake. Put one layer down and frost. Here's a warning. Your layers are not thick. You only want a tiny bit of frosting, maybe a heaping tablespoon, to cover the layer. If you go overboard on the frosting, you won't even notice that there is cake in there when you take a bite. That would be tragic. You might as well save yourself some trouble and just east the frosting out of the bowl.

Add a layer on top and frost again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Just keep going until you run out of layers. The original recipe called for two cakes to be assembled, but I just made one big one. I contemplated trimming up the edges of the cake to make it easier to frost evenly, but ended up just leaving it like this.

 This is a messy endeavor and I didn't even show you the counter by the stove. Just be warned.

 Finish frosting the cake with a generous layer on the outside.

 The Girl insisted on sprinkles.

How incredible does that look? As with the Carrot Cake, this is a LAYER cake. Be careful on the slice sizes!

This cake makes me happy. And it's tasty. I think you could use a white cake mix and tint it any color that you wanted. The Girl wants to make a blue and red one for Independence Day. If I can get my kitchen cleaned back up in time, we might attempt that.

Click here for Printable Recipe.


20 Layer Cake
adapted from Taste of Home
1 package (18-1/4 ounces) red velvet cake mix
2-3/4 cups whole milk
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 eggs
3 egg yolks
1/4 cup butter, melted
3 teaspoons vanilla extract
Cream Cheese Frosting

In a large bowl, combine the cake mix, milk, flour, eggs, egg yolks, butter and vanilla; beat on low speed for 30 seconds. Beat on medium for 2 minutes.
Heat a lightly greased 8-in. nonstick skillet over medium heat; pour 1/3 cup batter into center of skillet. Lift and tilt pan to coat bottom evenly. Cook until top appears dry; turn and cook 15-20 seconds longer. Remove to a wire rack. Repeat with remaining batter, greasing skillet as needed. When cool, stack crepes with waxed paper or paper towels in between.
To assemble the cake, place one crepe on a cake plate. Spread the cake with one rounded tablespoon frosting to within 1/2 in. of edges. Repeat layers until all crepes are used. Spread remaining frosting over tops and sides of crepe cake.

Two Day Carrot Cake

I can never remember liking carrot cake when I was younger. It just never seemed to sound appealing. I mean, really, why make a cake with VEGETABLES in it when you can just as easily make one with chocolate.

Curt posted this carrot cake recipe well over a year ago and it just looked so, so good. So I printed it off and just keep setting it aside, because I had a bunch of recipes with chocolate to make.

Last weekend we went to dinner with my Nana and she had carrot cake for dessert. It looked delicious, so I too had carrot cake for dessert. She said it was good carrot cake, but not the best she ever had, which made me think about this recipe.

Never having made carrot cake, I don't really know how this stacks up against any others, or even if it is in any way similar to others. But this is the recipe I have, so I'm going with this.

In a bowl, heat up 3 cups of water. Add in 3 tablespoons of rum. We are not big rum drinkers here, so I just sent Jeff to the liquor store to get a small bottle. Apparently our liquor store has an entire wall dedicated to the different flavors of rum. Dark rum. Light rum. Spiced rum. Strawberry rum. Our rural town has a larger selection of rum than wine. Interesting.

Anyway, add a cup of golden raisins to the diluted rum, cover and let sit.

In another bowl, add 6 (yes, six) cups of shredded carrots. I had no clue how many carrots it would take to make six cups. Turns out if you shred a large carrot, it makes up just about one cup. I ended up using a total of seven carrots.

Add one cup of brown sugar to the shredded carrots. Cover and let this sit for anywhere from 1 to 6 hours.

Now, the scientific among you might assume that this is to let the sugar absorb the juice from the carrots to form a delicious mush that will soon become cake. I now know that it is because after you shred seven carrots, you can't really lift your arm. No problem, just go finish off your bottle of rum to ease the pain.

After you wake up from the rum induced coma, in a large bowl, mix together 3 cups of cake flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda, 1 teaspoon salt, 4 teaspoons ground cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg and 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves. Set this aside for a moment.

In a large mixing bowl, whip together 4 eggs and 1 1/2 cup sugar until it's nice and frothy.

Then add in 1/2 Cup Vegetable Oil, 1/2 Cup Applesauce, 2 tsp Vanilla and 1 Cup Crushed Pineapple and mix well. 

Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture.

Mix until it is just combined.

Drain the raisins. The Boy didn't really believe me when I said these were raisins. They really plump up.

Add the raisins, carrots and walnuts and gently mix in to the batter.

Divide the batter between three round cake pans and bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes. The recipe I had said 40-50, but my oven runs a little hot. Stick a toothpick in and test for doneness if you aren't sure.

When they are done, let them cool for 15 minutes, wrap them in plastic wrap and refrigerate them overnight. 

The next day, mix up some cream cheese frosting. Now, I'm not really a frosting kind of person, and even though cream cheese frosting is my favorite, I didn't have a recipe for it. So I used the recipe supplied. 

Whip 2 blocks of cream cheese with a stick of softened butter, 2 cups of powdered sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla until nice and fluffy. 

 Spread in a nice thick layer onto your first cake.

 Don't scrimp. I thought I had a good layer on, but it wasn't near thick enough. If you need to, mix up another batch of frosting.

 Add the second cake on top and repeat with the frosting.

 I am really loving layer cakes right now.

 Even if it means I have to eat more frosting.

 Add that third cake on top. And here is where it gets good. To the remaining frosting, carefully fold in a cup or two of whipped cream. You could use Cool-Whip, but really, go for the real stuff here if you can.

 Use this to frost the top and outside.

Cut the cake.

Here's a tip. When you cut a piece of three layer cake, do not cut it the same size as you would a one layer cake. I totally misjudged the amount of cake in one piece and accidentally ate it all.

 I would hate for that to happen to you.

 I now love carrot cake. 


And cream cheese frosting.


This took a super long time to make, and it was completely worth it. I want to make it again next weekend and invite you over. I want you to make it this weekend and invite me over. Doesn't matter, just find a way to get this on your table.


Click here for Printable Recipe

The Two Day Carrot Cake
by Try It Tuesday
6 Cups Shredded Carrots
1 Cup Brown Sugar
Combine carrots and brown sugar and let stand for 1 to 6 hours.

1 Cup White Raisins
3 Cups Hot Water
3 Tbsp Rum

Combine these three and let them stand with the carrots.

1 Cup Toasted Walnut Halves, Chopped

Spread the walnuts out onto a cookie sheet and bake at 350 for about 8 mintues. Watch these carefully.

3 Cups Cake Flour
1 1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1 tsp Salt
4 tsp Ground Cinnamon
1 tsp Ground Nutmeg
1/4 tsp Ground Cloves

Mix in a bowl with a wire whisk and set aside.

4 Large Eggs
1 1/2 Cup White Sugar

Mix until frothy and add in:
1/2 Cup Vegetable Oil
1/2 Cup Applesauce
2 tsp Vanilla
1 Cup Crushed Pineapple, drained not pressed

Preheat the oven to 350.

Prior to combining the wet and dry ingredients grease and flour three 9 inch baking pans.

Combine The Wet and The Dry till just blended.

Drain the raisins. Add the Raisins, Carrots and Walnuts to the Batter. Don’t over mix…

Add the batter to your prepared pans making sure to make a divot in the center of each cake. This will prevent crowning and minimize the need for any trimming.

Bake at 350 for 30 to 40 minutes.

Place the cakes on a cooling rack and let them set for about 15 minutes.

Remove the cakes from the pans, wrap them in plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator. Leave them there over night.

Cream Cheese Frosting
3 Packages Cream Cheese
3 Cups of Powdered Sugar
2 tsp Vanilla
1 1/2 Sticks Butter. softened

Whip cream cheese and butter till light add vanilla and whip again till well mixed. Scrape down bowl and mix again.

Add sugar and mix well. Use this mixture to frost between the layers of the cake.

1 Cup Heavy Whipping Cream
1/3 Cup Sugar

Whip till stiff.

Fold whipped cream into the cream cheese mixture by hand. Do this gradually or you will break the whipped cream.