I can’t believe I have followed thru on my resolution this far. It’s already September! Only 3 more cakeys and I will have succeeded.

This month it was my dear friend, Jimmy’s 40th birthday so I just had to make him a cake (next month it is his husband’s birthday so he will probably get one too…). My scheduled cake for this month was a Chocolate Peanut Butter cake and lucky for me Jimmy approved. I had found this recipe on, you guessed it, Smitten Kitchen a while ago and have been dying to try it.

Let me preface this post by saying that my oven has been broken for 2.5 weeks. A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to bring a pie to a restaurant to see if they wanted to buy some to sell. I went to preheat my oven and twenty minutes later it still was not hot… 4 visits by repairmen later (3 by someone who doesn’t fix ovens and 1 by someone who does), and I still don’t have an oven. I am told I will be getting a new one today. We’ll see.. Tim and Jimmy were nice enough to let me come upstairs to make the pie in their oven and it turned out nicely. However, the restaurant in which I took it to turned out to be very un-dude. The owner stood me up (he knew the exact time I was coming) and even though I left the pie with the chef, I never heard back from anyone. WTF? Who does that? You can at least contact me and say one of three things, it sucked, I loved it or just thanks for the pie, we’ll think about it. 

Anyway, screw them, onto the cake. I knew Jimmy’s birthday was the 6th so I had to get this cake made. Again, T&J granted me permission to use their oven one afternoon and I got the baking part out of the way. This cake was extremely moist (view photo). After the layers cooled in the pan for a while, I unmolded them directly onto plastic wrap, cooled them a little longer then wrapped them tightly and placed them in the freezer. I knew if I had left them to cool directly on my wire rack for too long, they would stick and I would have a disaster.

Not sure why the cake is so damn moist (even a week later), perhaps the vinegar or the veg oil? They didn’t even ever seem to freeze fully. On the fifth, I made the frosting and glaze. I modified the frosting a bit because it called for FIVE cups of powdered sugar. FIVE! That is insane. I put three in, but then thought it should be a little firmer so I added one more. That was plenty. I can’t imagine more sugar making it better. I also had more than enough to ice the cake and write a birthday message on top.

The glaze is the fun part. Even my husband, the artist, was commenting on how nicely I had made the drips look. I also did this slightly differently. I don’t have the patience for a double boiler sometimes so I do the heat the liquid and pour over the chocolate method or just heat everything on low. It worked fine. There was also a buttload of this stuff, you could probably cut it down to 3/4 of the recipe, but it’s also better safe than sorry.

Final verdict- cake was a success. Everyone loved it. Now I am going to have some for breakfast…