Saturday, September 25, 2010

The Work Birthday Peanut Butter Cake...

 For this month's Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake (since it's becoming a monthly thing), I thought I'd try something different.  The peanut butter buttercream and peanut butter ganache are so rich and overpowering, that I took this as my chance to experiment with the cake mix+can of soda phenomenon. 

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, it turns out that you can use a can of soda and a cake mix - and nothing else - to make your cake, and it should turn out the same. 

On this note, I beg to differ a bit.  I used a dark chocolate fudge cake mix and diet cream soda.  The cream soda sounded like it would add some, well, creaminess, and the chocolate should cover the chemically flavor.  That all worked according the plan and the cake tasted fine.  As far as it turning out the same, well, it didn't.  Literally, the cake did not turn out of the pan the same; it left half the cake on the bottom and the other half on the cooling rack. 

Now, there are really a number of reasons this could have happened.  It might have been the soda, but it also might have been that I was dividing one mix into three pans rather than two to get three smaller layers (more filling that way).  It also could have been that I greased the pans with cooking spray for baking (with flour), rather than shortening as the box said (seriously, it actually said to use shortening).  Who knows.  In any case, I jammed the cakes together, filled them with two layers of peanut butter buttercream, covered the whole thing with peanut butter ganache and topped it off with crumbled peanut butter cups.

I heard no complaints. 

2 comments:

  1. As a rule, we complain about very few things covered in peanut butter cups.

    So, would you skip the "can o soda" option next time, or try to control for the other things?

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  2. I would probably skip the soda. Really, I should have spent more time on the cake anyway. I wanted to do a chocolate stout cake with the peanut butter frosting, but didn't have the time or energy. Maybe no more cake for work...

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