12monthsofcooking.com

Last year’s December issue is what inspired me to start this blog. This December’s issue didn’t dissapoint – Devil’s Food Cake with Peppermint Frosting !First onto the cake. I love to use my blender so making the cake was a lot of fun. The one thing I was a little intimidated about was cutting the cake in half. But my wife showed me a fantastic trick to use a piece of thread to cut the cake. Thanks Andi !After the cake cooled we did the chocolate ganache, and the peppermint cream. One complication was I didn’t have peppermint essence ( and additional complication it was a blizzard outside). I subsituted with creme-de-menthe instead – and it worked out fine. The ganache and the cream were easy enough but all of the separate stages made this a was a fair amount of work. Luckily I had two assistants helping me.Final assembly was perhaps the hardest part. It was easy to get things messy and the cream was a bit hard to spread. I’m also not an expert at icing but I got it in the end. It looked great !

So how was it ? This cake was great. It was a great chocolate devil’s food cake – very moist. The ganache and the peppermint cream are also. The frosting I think was a little too sugary, it was a bit like sugared marshmallows. It was well done but I don’t think it quite went with the cake – I will do something different here next time.

Great cake and great recipe ! ( and clean-up is fun too!)

If you’ve been paying attention – you’ll realize that this posting concludes my resolution for the year. I did it ! Looking back it’s certainly been a lot of fun. So with 5 days left for the year… what will I do next year ? I guess it’s time to shut-down this domain

Nope I’m still thinking about keeping this up and going – just a bunch of variants running through my head. Come back sometime to see what I do !