TWD—Dressy Chocolate Cake (9 inch Round, not Loaf)

We’re moving this week.  Too many emotions about it to write, so I’m not going to.  That being said as short as possible, we’re also excited to get to our big, new house!  I packed up most of the kitchen today. Will I be able to survive not baking for a week or more?  Stay tuned and see!  In planning ahead, I already made this week’s recipe for Tuesday’s With Dorie as well as next week’s recipe!  So know that it will be really hard for me not to be able to stop by all the wonderful blogs out there and see their chocolate cakes and vanilla bean tea cakes, but I WILL be back.  I think my turn to pick is coming up in August!!!  Whatever will I pick?  Will it be chocolate, Kayte?  Or will I be tempted by something else?  You’ll have to wait and see.

This week’s recipe was for Dressy Chocolate Loaf Cake in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours.  Amy Ruth from Amy Ruth Bakes chose this recipe.  A couple things here—I started making the recipe, without reading all the way through it and realized I needed one cup of sour cream.  Oops.  I’ve been trying to use up what we have in the fridge, and we only had about 1/4 cup of sour cream left, so I used that and 3/4 cup yogurt (fat free vanilla yogurt).  I’m not sure how much that changed the recipe (some flavor, I’m sure), but I suppose that doesn’t matter because the cake was well liked and eaten up!

Now--you must know, I didn’t make a loaf cake.  No real good reason.  I baked this in a 9 inch round cake pan.  (Baked for 50 minutes.)  And I didn’t put raspberry preserves.  No fruit with chocolate here.  (Although I would like it.)  I filled the middle of the cake with---wait for it, wait----

Caramel!  Using up things we have again, I used 6 ounces of unwrapped Kraft caramels melted together with 4 ounces of heavy cream.  Gooey caramel ganache.

I also made a dark chocolate ganache with 6 ounces of chocolate and 6 ounces of heavy cream.  Heat the cream just to boiling and pour it over the chopped chocolate.  Let it sit for a minute, then slowly whisk it together until is smooth.  I then let the ganache sit for about an hour before frosting the cake with it.  It becomes the perfect consistency!  (Bad lighting photos!)

This cake was screaming to be sprinkled with chopped pecans.

Kevin and Scott had a piece (the other boys didn’t want any), then I took the cake to share with my friends for our night out.  We were watching Survivor together, but that is over for the summer, so we’ve been watching So You Think You Can Dance.  I CANNOT dance, but they sure can on that show.  Anyway, the ladies really liked the cake.  Even Kevin thought it was pretty good.  I only took a few bites.  It was a lot more fudgy than we thought it was going to be, in a good way.  But I’d still rather have the taste and texture of a brownie. 

Thanks for the chocolate, Amy Ruth.  Check out the other (real) Dressy Chocolate Loaf Cakes over at TWD.

So like I said, I may not get to visit all your blogs this week and next and if I don’t, I’m sorry.  I’ll catch up eventually.

Goodbye, Kansas.  We’re clicking our heals together and chanting, “There’s no place like home”.

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Just a little sandwich fun the boys have had at lunchtime.

Sam got his last haircut with our friend, Tes, on Saturday.  Bye, Tes, we love you and we’ll miss you!

He always likes to help her sweep up.