Sour Cream Chocolate Cake with Cream Cheese Peanut Butter Frosting and Chocolate Peanut Butter Glaze
http://barefeetinthekitchen.blogspot.com/2011/10/chocolate-peanut-butter-cake.html
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My very first cake I baked from scratch: A 1-2-3-4 Coconut Cake with layers of Dark Chocolate Coconut Cream Cheese Frosting, Sweetened Coconut and Dark Chocolate Chips.
It’s square because I couldn’t find my round baking pans.
I swirled in some red and blue food coloring on two of the layers since July 4 is right around the corner.
For the cake: I modified this 1-2-3-4 cake recipe by adding both coconut and vanilla extract. And I didn’t make the frosting or the filling.
For the frosting: I used this dark chocolate coconut cream cheese frosting recipe but omitted the coconut flakes, added more coconut extract and a full stick of butter instead of half. And I added more cocoa to make it more chocolaty.
Tricks I learned:
Parchment Paper: I greased my pan, traced a piece of parchment to the size of the bottom of the pan, cut it out and then put it on the bottom of the pan. I greased over the parchment paper and light dusted the pans with flour. The cakes popped right out faster than with just greasing and flouring.
How to Make Self-Rising Flour: The cake recipe calls for self-rising flour. I didn’t have any. However, I found this recipe for it and made my own.
Corrections I need to make for next time: I couldn’t find my baking pans so I used those square disposable tin foil ones. They seems to work well until I pulled them out of the oven to rotate my cake 180 degrees. Then they started to lose their shape and my cakes were uneven because of it.
I wasn’t quite sure how to level or tort my cake so I just put the layers on top of each as is. So, one side was a little bit wonky do to the strange shape of the tin foil pans. Next time I am going to find my real pans and use them instead. That should alleviate a lot of the problem.
My next goal is to learn how to level and tort.
Minor issues: I wanted my frosting to be a bit thicker. I have never used cream cheese before so and wasn’t sure how the consistency was going to come out. Plus, I didn’t want to make the frosting too sweet. So, next time I will add more sugar and use less butter. Still, the frosting looks and tastes great. So, this is really more of a preference.
My flour measuring was not perfect and it made the cake more dense than what I would have liked. I am learning that baking is fixed. It’s not like regular cooking. If you mess up your measuring (even by a little) you will taste the difference.
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Wow!
