More Cake

Before anyone groans about two cake posts in a row, just know that it is birthday season around here. Both my kids have their birthdays in the spring, as do many of their (and our) closest friends. So springtime is always cake time.

This is one I made for the Vegetarian's friend, Arlo. I wrote on the cake and then the Vegetarian decorated it. Arlo asked for a chocolate cake with orange frosting. When pressed, he clarified that he wanted orange-flavored frosting, not orange colored frosting.

As with the German chocolate cake, I made this cake using ideas from a few different recipes.

The cake layers themselves were the recipe on the back of the Hershey's tin again, though I swapped the milk for sour cream and the water for hot coffee.

The middle was filled with a chocolate ganache, like this:

Then the top was iced with an easy version of Italian buttercream that I got from this chowhound thread, to which lots of orange zest had been added.

I enjoyed this cake. I liked the contrast between the ganache filling and the buttercream icing. A cake with ganche filling and frosting is often too richly chocolate, but if it's filled and frosted with buttercream i miss the moussy chocolate flavor of the ganache. So this cake lets you have both. The orange zest added just the right touch to the buttercream, which i sometimes think can be a little boring. I would make this cake again, tho I think that I might try a different cake layer recipe. This cake could use richer, denser, more poundcake-like cake layers, I think.