C is for Cumpleanos! Carlos! Chocolate! and Crumblesplosion :(

3 part cake batter

For Carlos's birthday party, I wanted to make a super awesome & amazing cake! In order to have it be a semi-surprise, at least in variety, I decided to try to find a recipe that combined two of his favorite flavors: chocolate and caramel. When I consulted with my baking skilled brother on it, he told me that our very favorite Baked cookbook had just such a recipe, the Sweet & Salty cake. This recipe was for a 3 layer cake with salty caramel ganache frosting. YUM!

mmmm all mixed!

They came out so well :)

When I quickly read the description, the cake seemed intensive but doable. I was so dedicated to making this thing awesome that I even finally splurged for a hand blender in order to make this thing totally perfect. I also had to get some round cake pans for the house. The recipe called for 3 8" pans. Bed, Bath & Beyond only had 9" pans... so I was lazy and decided to buy two of those instead. This could have been my fatal flaw.

ahhhh boiled over cream :(!

After some quick Safeway-ing, I started a little past noon on Sat. I decided to make the cake first, then follow up with the frosting. The cake itself took a very long time. All the ingredients had to be mixed separately and then combined. The problem was that it required 7 mins per item to combine, so time quickly racked up. As I say in every baking post (since I'm always conned in to this :p) I don't like chocolate cake at all. This batter was really tasty though, and I fully licked the spoons. I was planning on not completing filling the two pans since it had supposed to have been 3, but there was plentiful room so I did it anyways. In the oven for 40 mins they went.

burned caramel ganache WIP

I then looked at the recipe and realized I had made a big miscalculation. I realized that the "1/2 cup salted caramel" was different than the ganache frosting, meaning there were actually THREE different recipe items to prepare :(. I freaked out because I hadn't bought ingredients for the mix. Upon some inspection, I was lucky and found out that I had everything but sour cream, and some cursory internet searching taught me how to make a substitute from a few items int the fridge. Crisis averted.

very cooled cakes mmm

but it came out ok still!

I started first on the more intensive ganache. It involved making caramel, and then combining it with rich choco frosting ingredients. I don't know if you guys have ever tried to make caramel before, but it's really freaking hard >: |. You have to boil a corn syrup mixture for just the right amount of time. If you have it for like a minute too long or on too high of a temp, it will burn and completely harden on the bottom of the sauce pan. What made this trickier was that you also have to bring heavy cream to a boil and then let it cool for like 2 mins and then combine them and immediately pour over sectioned bakers chocolate. Of course I was doing this while the cake alarm kept going off... so basically I burned the caramel, boiled over the milk and didnt chunk the choco. Good times!!! I kept trucking and somehow the ganache came out ok. there was so much chocolate and cream that you couldnt taste the burned caramel. It was way too fluffy chocolately, but still good!

caramel attempt #2

success!!!!

The cakes themselves came out well and I left them to cool. Next, I attempted homemade caramel #2 for the inner sauce. I learned from my previous fail, and this time I made sure to not burn the caramel or overcook the cream. Mmm, a pot of boiling & delicious caramel a la Sharon! <3

look at these killer ingredients

how could anything go wrong?

By this time, I was feeling like a million bucks. Somehow, I had successfully prepared all 3 fancy ingredients! All that was left was to combine. It was like 4:00 by now, so the cakes were quite cool. I put the bottom layer on, caramelized it, ganached it, and moved on. :(. I was trying to be uber classy, so I started by cutting the rounded top off the second layer. Big mistake. For some reason, the structural integrity of the top layer was not there, and cutting the top was the final straw. As I carefully tried to flip it on top, the horror hit me. It was totally breaking apart. Being the brilliant one I am, I decided that putting tons of caramel and frosting on it would glue it together. Not so much. Quickly it all started crumbling to pieces. The more I tried to glue it back together, the worse it became.

AHHHHH!! note: this is after I cleaned it up a ton

Soon I had a giant pile of gushing, exploding mush on one side of the cake. It's hard to describe here, but there was a good 5 mins of me screaming profanities and crying and trying to fix the poor gourmet mess. I had to leave the room for awhile to calm down. When I returned things had settled a little bit, and I had to start excavating out the ruins of my poor cake. Choco was going everywhere (walls, ceiling, floor) I was grabbing it and dumping it by the handful in to the trash :(

piles of cake in garbage

Much mourning later, I decided I needed to salvage what I could, and used my artistic talents to pretend it was a C. It was mistaken for a PacMan.

final product. i tried to salvage what i could

All-in-all, the cake was totally delicious and amazing, I was just sad about wasting 5+ hours and like $50 on something that came out so crappy looking. Kind of want to try again :(