Bake 52: Chocolate Blackout Cake

 I promise this is the last cake I will post about this week. ;) 

If you like chocolate, this cake is for you.  Chocolate cake with chocolate pudding between the layers and crumbled chocolate cake on the outside.  When I first saw the picture in the book, I was sure those crumbles were Oreos.  I think that would be delicious, but it's actually cake.  All in all this was pretty easy to make and it wasn't so bad to assemble.  I think the hardest part was waiting for everything to cool properly.  It's not a cake than can be baked and assembled in an hour, it probably takes about 5-6 from start to finish and most of that is cooling time.

The original recipe calls for coffee but we don't have that on hand ever.  I substituted water with pureed strawberries and then the strawberry theme took hold.  It's easy to see why everything snowballed into strawberry, it's my favorite fruit and who doesn't love chocolate and strawberries?  Then it started to remind me of the flavors in the crepes we make and then I had to have a whipped cream and cream cheese topping.  I hadn't had my pastry tips out for a while (okay, fine, I had them out this weekend for the carrot cupcakes!) and I thought I would try to make this thing look presentable.  I halved the recipe (what else is new) and made it in smaller pans (one being a saucepan and another pan close to the same size about 5 or 6 inches) because we've already had cake this week.

 My layers of pudding don't look as good as those in the book!  But guess what, I ate it anyway.  Ghastly.

 Although the cake was a different texture than I am used to, you can't go wrong with chocolate, strawberries, cream cheese and whipped cream.  But that's just me.

 Our hostess this week was Courtney, If you'd like the recipe you can find it on her blog HERE.