For valentines day I made a frankenstein of a cake. By that I mean I used parts of multiple recipes and cobbled them all together into a cake that was far too large for four to eat on their own. Personally I am very proud of what I managed to make, but I will agree with my family that it was a lot of cake to go through.
The idea of a layered cake was something I knew that I wanted to do for valentines day, and I knew I wanted it to be chocolate. In the end I made a three layer choclate cake with a filling of cream cheese icing and strawberry jam, and all of it covered in a rich chocolate frosting. I think the fact that the cream cheese frosting and the chocolate frosting were a little too sweet didn’t help with just how much cake there was, but so long as you got a good slice with a little bit of everything it was very tasty.
The odd shape to the cake was because of how much batter there was in the original cake recipe. When I saw how thick the cake was (it looked delicious but I’m sure I could have split one of the cake layers into two, easily) I decided to try and thin the cake out a little by cooking my cake in a roll pan. I think the cake turned out a decent thickness from that, but I wasn’t sure how wide / long I should keep the cake when I was cutting the massive sheet. It was also a very moist cake, which made it a little more difficult to manuever than I was expecting.
Because of how long it took to make eveyrthing it turned into a multiple day assembly, with me making the cake and filling on day one, then assembling and adding the outer frosting on day two. I had wanted to do some nice icing on the outside of the cake but it was both very large and I didn’t want to make another batch of icing for it, so it ended up being rather plain in appearance.
If I were to make the cake again I would likely do three things differently. One, I would make the cake all in one day, as I worry that the multi day assembly process made the cake drier than I wanted. Two, I would only make it a two layer cake, and I would trim the cake pieces to a more manageable size. Three, I think I would add extra liquid, such as milk, to the frostings, just to thin the frostings out more than I did the first time I made them. I think making a softer, less dense frosting would help with the over-all sweetness.
