Let’s Eat: Cake that looks like…well, cake!

It has been a long time since I’ve been up for researching and playing with recipes. Or documenting my cooking. Bit of a kitchen-centered block, I suppose. Due to a combination of general life busyness and, more insurmountably, growing moroseness at the state of the world beyond my own culinary safe space. It felt like ever-more insensitive frivolity to be creating a gaming and cooking blog in the face of the grim reality so many are now struggling in…

The last food-related writing I did was to start on the chapter where the Snobeedle Meadery Halflings treat our company to a delightful supper. This featured a dish of roasted mushrooms packed generously with garlicky golden herbed breadcrumbs. Since I was already stuffing things into other things, I decided to add another dish on the general edible-treats-crammed-inside-other-edible-deliciousness. And made Chicken Kiev. This was intended as a clumsy tribute – a culinary gesture of support if you will – for Ukraine. Rather inept and useless, I realize. And, as the new US administration flexed its authoritarian muscles and matters rapidly got worse for people both domestically and abroad, it started to feel futile, depressing, and offensive, all in one. I was not able to move forward with that post.

I am coming back to my blog without any actual answers. Still in serious angst about the spiraling situation here in the USA. Still fluctuating between disgust, grief, and anger; depending on the day and the headlines. But I do like to cook and to eat and to game and to write. And I fully appreciate how privileged I am to be able to pursue these light-hearted hobbies. And to feel the happiness that comes from sharing stories and treats with people I love. So, no answers and no guarantee that I will always be able to wade through the grim crap to appreciate the joy in a bit of harmless escapism. But, when I find myself able to lean into the positive, I will continue to try to make things that taste good and look tempting. And to tell stories that do justice to our wonderfully creative GM and to the enthusiastic gaming group that I am fortunate enough to be a part of. All in service of making my tiny little corner of the interwebs cosy and welcoming. And, out in the real world, I will try to enact more meaningful change.

It feels right to start back in with something sweetly indulgent. Several chapters brimming with the shameless sugariness of cakes, pies, and tarts! These recipes are my celebration of dessert and are intended to create a bond of over-served sympathy between us and Elodie. A future Elodie (prepare for a sneak peek at upcoming chapters!). One that innocently partook of a dinner prepared by the followers of Erevan Ileser, trickster god of the Seldarine. She was expecting a varied and nutritionally balanced meal, only to discover that everything was cake. And more cake…

I have not leveled up sufficiently in my pastry-chef skills to attempt bakes that masquerade successfully as other dishes. So I am keeping it simple with unadorned recipes for the desserts themselves. If you choose to camouflage your chocolate-peanut butter cake as a lasagna, or your apricot-cream brioche tart as a side salad, I will be impressed and envious. And Elodie will be most grumpy…

Fudge-glazed Creamy Peanut Butter Cake

This recipe, with only minimal changes, comes from the King Arthur Flour website. I doubled the original recipe to make a four-layer cake. Perhaps not the best idea, given that this is a wonderfully rich and gooey cake. And therefore had difficulty standing up respectably straight under the weight of its own chocolatey excess. But I was making it for my goblin child’s birthday celebration. Trying to add magic to their special day by presenting them with, essentially, a gigantic Reese’s piece in cake form. If you like chocolate and peanut butter, this will not disappoint…

Ingredients:

For the cake:

400g/2 cups granulated sugar

240g/ 2 cups AP flour

14g/ 2tblsp cornstarch

56g/2/3 cup Dutch-process cocoa

10g/ 2 tsp baking powder

10g/2 tsp espresso powder

2.5g/1/2 tsp baking soda

5g/1 tsp kosher salt

4 large eggs at room temperature

135ml/2/3 cup vegetable oil

5ml/1 tsp vanilla extract

2-4 drops of rum extract

285ml/1 cup + 4tblsp cool water

For the icing:

340g/2 cups semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, chopped

170ml/12 tblsp heavy cream

130g/1 cup chopped salted peanuts, toasted (garnish)

For the filling:

410g/1.5 cups creamy peanut butter (you can, I suppose, use chunky peanut butter here if you are, I don’t know, a Illithid-level monster)

455g/4 cups confectioner’s sugar

5ml/1 tsp vanilla extract

2-4 drops of rum extract

150ml/2/3 cup milk

Method:

1. Prepare for cake-making. Fire up your furnace. By which I mean, place a rack in the middle of your oven and pre-heat the hotbox to 180C/350F. Butter two 20cm/8 inch round cake pans, line each with a circle of parchment paper (or, if you, like me, are lacking a little in the arts and crafts department, an amorphous, somewhat ovoid shape of parchment paper). Butter the paper too, just to be safe.
2. Make the cake. Whisk together the sugar, flour, cornstarch, espresso powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Also known as the dry ingredients. Whisking them gets rid of any pesky lumps in the sugar and cocoa (cocoa is notorious for lumping). And it aerates the flour without the extra step of passing it through a sieve. Add eggs, oil, vanilla, and rum extracts. Mix until smooth. Add the water, mixing again. Pour the cake mix into your prepared pans, splitting it evenly. You can use a scale if you would like beautifully symmetrical, identical chocolate cake-disks.
3. Bake the cakes for 35-38 minutes or until shrinking slightly away from the edges of the pan, no longer sizzling/making active-baking cake noises, and until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Cool in the pan for at least 15 minutes before turning out onto racks to finish coming to room temperature. When completely cooled, proceed with filling and frosting. Or wrap well in waxed paper and plastic wrap before either storing on the counter until the following day. Or freezing if you plan to use them later.
4. For the icing, make a chocolate ganache. I have lost faith in the seductive convenience of microwaves and chocolate. And prefer to go old-school with a pot of cream on the stove. Gently heated until it just reaches the point where the first wisps of steam appear above the tremulous bare-tremble of the milky white surface. The pre-boil point, basically. Remember, as Dame Mary Berry says, “chocolate melts in a child’s pocket”. So, once your cream reaches that just-starting-to-simmer place, take it off the heat and add the chopped chocolate. Stir to help it melt evenly and you will be rewarded with a silky and shiny chocolate mix. Let the ganache cool for 30-45 minutes, during which time it will thicken a little and become lusciously spreadable.
5. For the filling, mix together peanut butter, confectioner’s sugar, vanilla and rum extracts. This will create a crumbly rubble of beige lumps. Beat in the milk in portions. The mixture will smooth out. Keep adding milk until it is thick and spreadable.
6. Assemble your final creation. Slice the cakes in half horizontally to create four even layers. Pick a sturdy bottom piece and place it, cut-side up, on a serving platter. Spread with 1/3 of the peanut butter filling. Cover with a second cake slice and cover with another 1/3 of peanut filling. Place a third cake slice onto the stack and spread with the final 1/3 of filling. Top with the final cake slice, cut side down. Frost the cake with chocolate ganache and decorate with chopped toasted peanuts. If not serving within the next few hours, store, covered, in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

Assemble your ingredients.

I know, it looks a little like you are going to cake-war. But, if you are not actually taking pictures of the step-by-step of this process, you can simply weight all the dry ingredients into one bowl, the wet ingredients into a second, and start mixing. Not as much clean-up as the above picture terrifyingly implies 🙂

Do remember to turn on the oven and prepare your baking pans.

Here is where you get rid of those annoying bowls. All in one, baybee!

Combine all that powdery goodness…

And whisk until fine and lump-free.

Plop in the eggs.

Followed by the vegetable oil and vanilla + rum extracts. Things will start to turn interesting colors. And develop a fun, toxic-wasteland, kind of sheen.

Bring the dry and the wet ingredients together. It will not look terribly encouraging at this juncture…

But after you start adding the water, it will come together into a more smoothly homogenous batter.

Thus.

Divide the cake mixture evenly between your pans and take a moment to appreciate the breathtakingly, cartoonishly chocolate shine of the cake-to-come.

20 minutes into baking is when I like to rotate the position of the pans in the oven. Cake babies are doming a little alarmingly at this point…

Here they are, all baked and cooling.

Time to toast your nuts.

My peanuts did not turn uniformly golden – they just singed patchily in places. Still, the extra step did give them an added crunch and a toasty flavor that made it worth doing.

Time for the chocolate ganache. All that is needed is cream and chocolate.

Add your cream to a medium-sized pot and warm gently.

You should start to see the surface just begin to ripple and tiny bubbles start to appear at the edges of the pot. That is sufficient heating; turn off the stove at this point.

And add in all your chocolate bits and bobs.

The residual heat of the cream will be enough to start melting the chocolate.

Keep stirring! These are just standard ganache growing pains. It will come together.

Into this absolutely glorious gleaming creation.

On with the peanut butter filling.

The peanut butter and icing sugar start off with the classic enemies-to-friends trope.

Actually, it’s enemies-to-enemies. Yeah, they pretty much stay in eternal enmity.

That is, until the milk joins the party. Unassuming new arrival? That is putting it kindly, to say the least. This stage is quite upsetting but power through.

Have faith and, yet again, the strangely unsettling mess will once more turn into something silky and spreadable. I did not initially need all the milk to achieve this stage. But, as the filling sat for a while before I was ready to assemble the cake, it did firm up significantly. I ended up using the last bit of milk to bring it back to malleable tameness right before I filled the cake layers.

Which are here. Sliced as evenly as I can get them.

First layer getting its nutty filling.

And the last layer. Alas, this is confession time. While I doubled the rest of the recipe, my brain apparently took a fun little vacation when I was making the peanut butter frosting. So I only had the original amount prepared (enough to generously fill one sandwich cake). And, here is my second confession, at this point I decided that this was not going to be an issue. Because I do not like peanut butter (!!!). At least, not with chocolate. I buried this shameful secret in the photo captions where perhaps it can remain safely hidden from the world. But, not having grown up in the American tradition of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I was accustomed to eating my peanut butter in savory form (think spread on toast with Indian hot mango pickle, or used to enrich a West African chicken stew). I know, strange. Anyway, I was already a little uneasy about the sheer sticky sweetness of this cake and made the bold choice to go with less filling. In the hopes of giving the darkly bitter and nuanced chocolate components a chance to sing. I like chocolate. Also, I was too lazy to make a second batch of peanut butter filling. So, unlike the picture of the original (which can be found on the KAF website: http://www.kingarthurflour.com), in which pillowy waves of unctuous nut filling pour out in tantalizing tan-caramel waves from between the dark chocolate layers, my version is a little more austere. By which I mean that I was really struggling to scrape up enough filling to cover my final layer of cake. Frustratedly trying to get it to stretch far enough to at least form a complete, uninterrupted schmear across the chocolate surface. The literal scraping left a bunch of cake crumbs on the filling. Ugh, it was a massacre.

And, sadly, there is not happy oozing out of nutty filling once the layers are set in place. You can barely see it at all. Sigh.

Still, chocolate ganache will cover many sins. And is particularly satisfying when you can practically see the world reflected back at you, in improved, chocolatey form, from its shining surface.

Time for nutty embellishment…

Like so.

Don’t forget to clean up the platter for a crisper, less nut-littered look.

And then, is that just a hint of edible gold glitter sprayed over the entirety? Why yes. Yes it is.

Hope you have something special to celebrate!