Wishing you an Absol-utely wonderful Valentine's Day! 🖤
This black cocoa lambeth cake was a fun challenge, especially making Absol out of icing and in 3D!
I've been enjoying planning out what Pokemon dessert we'll make on our live Twitch streams in advance, and when one chatter suggested an Absol Valentine's cake, I was sold! Plus Shiny Absol has the perfect colour scheme, and the Mega has those cupid wings, so what could be better?🪽🪽
This is also my first Valentine's Day with Miss_Editor as wife and wife, so I had to do my buff goth wife justuce! (She also helped decide on and write the text!)
Now if only I wasn't sick on Valentine's Day 🥲
Here's the black cocoa cake recipe and the black cocoa icing recipe, though the latter gave me some trouble.
Feeling very pleased with how this belated-birthday cake turned out!
Dutched chocolate cake with balsamic-berry filling for a (maybe pastel-) goth birthday 💜🖤
I’ve been trying to perfect my blackberry chocolate cake, but since it’s so labour-intensive, I normally don’t make double-layer buttercream cakes more than once a year. So the going’s been slow.
Blackberry jams are typically very seedy, which isn’t ideal for a cake. I bought a seedless blackberry jam, but it turned out to be thick and pectiny: you can slice it. I happened to have some mulberry jam, so I thought that combining the two might make solve this texture issue. I heated a mixture of both jams on the stovetop, but the pectiny jelly just wasn’t breaking down, so I used an immersion blender. The mulberries have a woody stem which also makes for an unpleasant texture. The blender didn’t break these down well.
The mulberry jam was also very sweet! So to cut the sweetness I added balsamic vinegar and a splash of lemon juice.
The resulting mixture had a good flavour, but a pulpy texture. It didn’t “drizzle” well. Heating it up to make it more runny was a bad idea: it melted the buttercream.
In the future I might try doing this instead:
purple buttercream all over
dark ganache drizzle around the edges
pipe a decorative buttercream border along the top
fill the interior of the buttercream border with the fruit mixture