Chocolate Insanity

Today is Steve's birthday.  In honor of his special day, I got it in my head to make him a 14-layer cake.  I read this post on Bakerella a while back and made a mental note of it.  Mind you, Bakerella has more patience, a cleaner kitchen, and fewer child-like helpers around the house, but I think my creation is acceptable.  I had to tweak my version because Steve's birthday request was for a chocolate cake with white icing.  What he ended up with was a chocolate sour cream cake with a white chocolate ganache filling and white chocolate buttercream icing.  

Using fat-free sour cream and Eggbeaters was the only way I could make this recipe even remotely healthy, though I'm not sure it qualifies as healthy.  If anything, the sour cream and Eggbeaters make it only slightly less heart-attack inducing.

I think the pans look pretty cool, though in hindsight I could have spent less time photographing them and more time spreading the batter evenly.

 Action shot of a cake baking!  (I'm pretty sure this is cutting-edge blogging now.)  Thanks to our double oven, I was able to bake 6 cakes at a time.  I'm a little disappointed that I haven't had the chance to bake the 100+ nuggets that my oven allegedly has room for, but at least I can say that I used it to make 14 cakes in under an hour.

My fleet of cakes are cooling.  They remind me of big pancakes.

Chopping the white chocolate for the ganache.  I was so tempted to sneak a few bites, but I held off.  Really.  I did.

It's not quite done yet.  The cakes are stacked and the filling is in place.  Next time I do this, I will be sure to double the amount of filling I use.  Also, next time I will be sure not to drop two of the layers on the ground.  The astute reader will note that we're down to a 12-layer cake now.

This is the frosting step.  Right now there's only butter and powdered sugar in the bowl.  I almost stopped at this step, but with melted white chocolate and heavy cream waiting in the wings, I figured this concoction could only get better.

I brought in my assistants for the fun part.

Quality control was a little lax on this project.

This isn't exactly the final product.  My "helpers" insisted on a very healthy dose of sprinkles on top of the cake.  I don't mind sprinkles, if they're used in moderation, but I'm afraid we've violated some sort of acceptable sprinkle-to-cake ratio.

So this picture isn't a terribly flattering shot of my cake, which has some uneven frosting going on on top.  I blame my frosting assistants.  Or perhaps the weight of the sprinkles.  When I try this cake again, I think I'll opt for a more noticeable filling.  I was hoping the ganache would stand out a bit more.  In any case, it was delicious.  I cut myself a teensy slice after my Tuesday night workout, so hopefully the calories consumed and the calories burned will even out.  Oh and check out the birthday boy in the background!