Traditional Chocolate Cake

I made this chocolate cake when I found out I wouldn’t have to work on Family Day — sweet! It’s actually for my dad’s birthday, which was last Wednesday, but I didn’t get a chance to make it earlier because of Valentine’s Day and culinary school things.

It turned out beautifully, in my opinion. I love, love chocolate so this was so much fun to make. I used a recipe I found on Epicurious, originally from a 1995 edition of Bon Appetit.

In my culinary desserts class at school, we would cut the top layer off of the cakes once they come out of the oven to make the layers even for stacking. It makes the cakes more professional-looking and also easier to frost. This cake is only for my family though and I would never want to waste any of the precious chocolate cake.

I tried to pour the batter into the greased and floured pans as evenly as possible.

Then I sprinkled the pans with chocolate chips 🙂

This is the first layer of the cake, with icing.

This is a delicious picture of the first two layers of cake with icing and lots of oozing icing.

And finally, the three layers all stacked up. If I had cut the cake layers to even them out, like I’ve done at school, there would have been no spaces between the layers.

Is there another way I can avoid this without wasting any cake?

Try it at home and let me know what you think.

You can find the recipe here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Old-Fashioned-Chocolate-Cake-with-Cocoa-Frosting-755

Yours edibly,

Elana