Chocolate cake

Another week means another birthday and another cake to make. I'd been promising a chocolate cake for a while now, so I chocolate overloaded on this one.

On this weekend's episode of The Pioneer Woman she made a chocolate birthday cake. I love her recipes and this one looked pretty easy, so I thought about making the cake and the frosting. I realized I didn't have time to make the cake from scratch, so I used a cake mix, but I did make the frosting. It couldn't be easier, just cream, chocolate and a little vanilla. The hardest part about making the
frosting was waiting for it to be cold enough to whip. But once it was firm, it whipped up in no time.

the ganache before cooling

The only problem I had with this frosting was that I wasn't able to pipe with it. When it was cold it was too hard to get out of the bag, and when it was room temp it was just too runny. But I solved that problem by adding chocolate chips around the edges and dark chocolate hershey's kisses on the top of the cake.

I didn't think I had put enough frosting between the cake layers, but luckily I did. I made 3 layers out of the cake mix to make the cake a little different and to have more frosting throughout. Needless the say this cake was a hit and it was gobbled up before I knew it.

One of these days I'll actually make the cake from scratch. Maybe when it's not so hectic for me, like it has been this month.