Ombre Chocolate Cake

I've been dreaming of making i am baker's rose cake for a while. It's so beautiful and, from her description, pretty easy to make. I was stuck on what cake to pair it with. I found the Black Magic Cake, which looked deep, dark, and decadent. I was going to use raspberry jam for the filling and simple buttercream (made with a combo of butter and shortening) for the roses.

Despite my best intentions, things didn't turn out quite the way I expected. Mostly due to user error.

The cake is incredibly simple to make. It is very moist, deep and decadent and delicious. However, I underbaked it just a touch, which made constructing the layers a little hard. And the crumb coat wasn't great because the moist cake kept, well, crumbling.

My second issue arose when, for some bizarre reason, I decided to decorate the cake while the girls were awake and running around. Now, while the rose technique is easy, you definitely need a chunk of uninterrupted time to get the crumb coat done well, especially on this cake recipe. In short, I needed more of my attention, and more icing, than I could give at the moment, so I scrapped the rose idea.

I found a great ombre variation of the rose cake, which has also been kicking around in the back of my head. I had an idea to make a chocolate ombre frosting design, I just needed to go to the store to get some frosting. I didn't have enough of my buttercream to finish the cake, and I didn't have enough powdered sugar to make any more. Also, I was just at that phase where I wanted to get the damn thing done.

What happened next was a lemons-into-lemonade moment. After our playdate, I went to give the girls a bath before naps, only to discover we had no water. A call to the water company revealed there were a bunch of main breaks in the area and who knew when we'd get water back. I pack up the girls, in their pjs, to go to the store to get bottled water, paper plates, and... chocolate and vanilla fosting.

Fate has a great sense of humor, because water was back when we got home.

By this time, I was too tired to even pipe any frosting, so I just mixed and smeared around the cake. In about 10 minutes, I had an ombre chocolate cake. And, it looked fairly good, much to my surprise.

Now, I'm going to say something shocking: while I like frosting, I don't like massive amounts of frosting. I also don't like avocados, so, who knows. Next time I make this, I'll probably do a Dream Whip or whipped cream-type frosting. The cake is dark and lucious, but it doesn't really need a "big" frosting to balance it out.

I will definitely try both the cake recipe and the rose technique again. But only during naptime.