But this chocolate cake is juuuuuust right.

So I can't quite say I'm the Goldilocks of chocolate cake because I only made two this weekend instead of  the three that Goldilocks status would require, but I feel so much better after making the 2nd cake that I want to compare myself to Goldilocks.

This post has already taken a weird turn. Anyway. I woke up yesterday determined to practice buttercream roses (I learned how to make them from a YouTube tutorial that I found on Pinterest, oh the wonders of technology) and I figured well, if I'm going to defrost the buttercream I may as well make a cake to frost with it. I tried a different cake recipe (from this cookbook) - I used their German chocolate cake recipe without the part that makes it German (the frosting, which, by the way, is a misnomer because it's not actually from Germany, it was created by the German chocolate company to sell more cakes). But I digress. I didn't especially like this recipe but it may be my own fault - I divided a 9" recipe in half to get a 6" recipe, and that results in more volume than a 6" cake pan is designed to handle, which means that the cake itself takes longer than usual to set up in the center because the cake pan is not conducting heat as effectively as it should - so basically, by the time the inside of the cake is cooked, the outside of the cake is overcooked. Maybe I should have reduced the temperature of the oven and done it low and slow or something. Anyway. I digress again.

The batter was delicious for this cake as well - doesn't it look yummy?

Jeremy asked me ten times this weekend if I was baking brownies even though I said probably twelve times that I was making chocolate cakes. But I guess that's what I'm trying to find - a chocolate cake that tastes as good as brownies. I haven't found it yet. But on a positive note, our house smelled like brownies/chocolate/chocolate cake all weekend. Yum! 

I did the usual - cooled the cakes after they were baked, leveled them, torted them, filled them with raspberry jam (I just typed raspberry ham which would be very different from jam), put on a crumb coat, and put it in the fridge to chill. While that was going on, I started practicing my buttercream roses. And I am now in love with buttercream roses. I will make them and put them on anything. My clothes, my dinner, whatever, I don't care. I'll make them out of mashed potatoes if I have to. They are just SO fun to make - and SO SO SO easy. Trust me - if you can handle a piping bag, you can do this. 

After the cake had chilled, I put the roses in the fridge to chill and then started working on icing the cake. I used the petal tip to create what I call the cummerbund effect on the sides of the cake - vertical lines standing next to each other all around the cake. I guess a cummerbund would really be horizontal lines, but this is my blog so get off me. 

After the cummerbund was finished I continued using a petal tip to pipe a layer of icing in concentric circles on the top of the cake, then I switched out to the shell tip to create a shell border around the top and bottom of the cake. Finally, I placed the chilled roses on top of the cake (they were so easy to handle once they were cold because they were nice and firm). This is the finished product:

And I've gotta say I might be more proud of this one than I was of the shower cake. I just LOVE the buttercream roses. I just wish I liked to eat buttercream more than I actually do. 

So I still need to learn more buttercream piping techniques but I'm still having fun learning what I'm learning right now. The funniest part is that both Kelly and Jared/Heather want really simple cakes - nothing too fussy/fancy with lots of piping. So this is really just for my own edification. But that's ok with me because I'm having fun. :)