Chocolate Cherry Cake

This cake is delicious and easy. And gorgeous and impressive. And people will love you for it.

It's the Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cake from Beki Cooks Cake blog. Her taste test on fondant was interesting and helpful. I don't use fondant, but maybe I'll start branching out.

For my cake, I baked the batter in 2 8" rounds, chopped up some of the extra maraschino cherries for the filling and used a buttercream icing mix, which had meringue powder already in it.

My ganache topping wasn't as smooth as hers, but I was more interested in getting the "drips" right than smoothing out the top. It gives it... character, right?

When my friends took their first bite, there was no sound but muffled "mmmmm"s in the room. I love the chocolate/vanilla buttercream combination and the ganache and cherries added even more texture and dimension. I almost cried when I ate the last piece the other day.