Milk Chocolate Frosted Layer Cake

Yesterday I made the most complicated cake I've ever baked.  Looking at the finished cake, it doesn't look like it should be complicated.  The recipe for milk chocolate frosted layer cake came from an issue Food & Wine published in February of 2009.  It's one of a ton of recipes that I've torn out of magazines and put away for later.  It only took me four years to get to it!

It's a two-layer cake, made with cake flour instead of all-purpose flour.  Why complicated?  You whisk the dry ingredients together and set aside.  You melt the butter into the milk.  Then you separate eggs and mix the butter/milk mixture, egg yolks, and half of the sugar.  The dry ingredients get added.  That sits while you beat the egg whites until they get to a certain consistency.  Then you gradually add the rest of the sugar and beat until the egg whites are stiff and glossy.  Finally, you fold those egg whites into the chocolate mixture and divide the batter between two cake pans.  None of these steps are hard, but it isn't exactly dump and stir.  It isn't even cream the butter and sugar and add the dry ingredients.  I had to check the recipe a lot while making this.  A handy tip- if the recipe says to butter and flour the cake pans, and the cake is a chocolate cake, use cocoa powder instead.  You won't have a bunch of white powder all over your dark cake.  The cocoa blends right in.

cocoa instead of flour

Granted, that's Valrhona cocoa powder, so I didn't want to waste it, but it doesn't take much to coat the pans after they've been buttered.  If I had to guess, I used maybe a tablespoon's worth for two pans.  Okay, how did the cake taste?  Not good.  The icing was overwhelming.  I could hardly taste the cake itself.

The layers were surprisingly thin.  This whole cake was about the thickness of the one-layer pumpkin cake I make.  I don't have much more to say about it other than I won't be making it again.  I will say that this failure doesn't mean I won't keep trying new recipes.  I like trying new things.  If you don't try new things, you'll never know if you're missing out on something great.