This actually is a second attempt at the Sam’s favorite chocolate cake from a previous post. Just in a different form.
I really wanted to make tiny cakes recently. Individual sized cakes. Which is weird really, because I don’t often like to make indiv things. I’m more of a giant pot of stuff type of person and everyone takes a portion. But anyway, I wanted to make indiv cakes.
This time, I used Dutch process cocoa powder instead of natural to see if that would lighten up the texture of the cake. I think it did a little, but not enough to my liking. When I think of chocolate cake, I think of either really dense fudge cake (fudge is a really funny word), or a lighter devil’s food cake. I subscribe to the idea that devil’s food is the chocolate equivalent of angel’s food cake, if that wasn’t apparent already.
The chocolate cake recipe that is allegedly Sam’s favorite isn’t really either of those textures. It’s something in between and also kind of…rubbery? Something about the texture just doesn’t quite do it for me.
Also, I prefer my chocolate cakes to have a really strong chocolate flavor with maybe some coffee background. That’s easily corrected, but I thought I might mention that.
I baked the cake this time in a half sheet pan (and quarter sheet pan) because I certainly wasn’t going to bake 129837192837 cakes in tiny pans. It makes much more sense to punch rounds (I think I used a 2.5″ diameter) out of a big sheet of cake than it does to bake 19287329813 tiny cakes. That worked well enough. Just remember to reduce the cooking time if your recipe is quoting for an 8″ or 9″ pan, since there’s so much more surface area when baking sheet cakes.
I decided on assembling three layer mini cakes because that was about the size I had imagined. The filling layers were cherry preserves with some lemon juice and rind. They were finished with a drizzle of soy milk ganache. I thought about fully frosting it with whipped ganache, but decided I rather liked the “unfinished” look. Also, I was lazy.
And as a bonus, I got a lot of yogurt parfaits out of the leftover cake pieces. I just tore the cakes into bite sized chunks and layered vanilla yogurt and raspberries on top. Tada!
Random moosages as I see fit. 