Son in law LOVES chocolate. Well, most everyone does. I have saved a cake photo on my dessert Pinterest board waiting for his December birthday. It didn't go quite as I planned and I could almost send it to the Pintrosity site!
First, I asked hubs to pick up some chocolate candies while he was out, then after he left I started the cake. Hmm. Only I had no chocolate cake mix. Yeah, I know.. it's the lazy way out, but he doesn't care if I use a mix and all the extras going on the cake will make up for it. So anyway, I took a quick trip to a nearby store and bought a chocolate cake mix. I turned on the oven to preheat and got busy mixing up the cake. THEN I opened the cabinet for cake pans. I failed to remember that I packed them for storage during one of our "get ready to sell the house weekends". I'm pretty good at improvising, so I used the jelly roll pan that was not packed with the intent to cut and stack. This is the practically disaster part: cake mixes are softer in texture and although it stacked okay, icing those crumbly sides was not working. (No, there are no pictures, I didn't know it was going to be such an ordeal) I put the cake in the deep freezer and waited. Once it was frozen stiff, I trimmed the sides square and finished icing it with a dark chocolate butter cream, placed it back in the freezer to firm up the icing for the next phase.
Once it was firm, I pulled it back out and added another layer of milk chocolate butter cream so I could press on mini semi sweet chocolate pieces all over the cake. A variety of chocolate candy bars was chopped and placed on top with some finely crushed Oreo cookies and a chocolate ganache dribbled over the cake and some maraschino cherries finished it off.
If this doesn't make him chocolate wasted...nothing will!
I did make the butter cream icings. One using melted dark chocolate baking squares and one using light chocolate powder. The ganache is made using several fun size Hershey bars, Musketeer bars, a tablespoon of the mini semi sweet chocolate chips, a teaspoon of butter and enough heavy cream to cover the chocolate in the little bowl they were in. (maybe 1/4 cup?) Heat in the microwave 1 1/2 minutes and stir until cool.
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