When I asked Pete what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday he couldn't decide between yellow and chocolate, then he said "checkerboard!" After searching all over for a cake pan insert (could only find them on the
internet) I finally called Will and had an engineering brainstorming session. This is what I came up with:
A large formula can and a plastic party cup. It wasn't exactly the diameter I was looking for, but it was the best I could do. I bought box mixes, since I knew I would have my hands full with the assembly. Here are the two batters. Please note that the chocolate batter is considerably thinner than the yellow batter. This will be important later.
Here is the beginning of the batter division. I had put yellow in the center and chocolate in the middle. It was very hard to get the batter in, mostly because of the tallness of the can, but also because of the narrowness of the circles. So it's a little messy.
It was also very difficult to get the right amount of batter into each 'channel'. And I couldn't go back and adjust, because I had to remove the can and cup. So sometimes the chocolate would be higher than the yellow, and then when I'd take the cups out they would kind of slop into each other....
Here are the three cooked layers. Henry thought they looked like jack-o-lanterns. I shaved a little off the top of the bottom two layers to make them stack better, and in hopes that it would just be the tops that weren't the correct stripey-
ness.
Here they are all assembled, with a lovely
Ghirardelli bittersweet
ganache in between the layers.
And here's the final frosted version. I took it from this angle, which is less lopsided than the other side.
And here is the less-than-perfect checkerboard cake, once cut. For some reason the entire center layer looks completely chocolate. It tasted yummy, none-the-less.
I will not attempt checkerboard again unless I get the right tool. Here's a photo of some of the clean-up...
And the rest of the clean up...
I think I'll have a piece of leftover cake right now!
A large formula can and a plastic party cup. It wasn't exactly the diameter I was looking for, but it was the best I could do. I bought box mixes, since I knew I would have my hands full with the assembly. Here are the two batters. Please note that the chocolate batter is considerably thinner than the yellow batter. This will be important later.
Here is the beginning of the batter division. I had put yellow in the center and chocolate in the middle. It was very hard to get the batter in, mostly because of the tallness of the can, but also because of the narrowness of the circles. So it's a little messy.
It was also very difficult to get the right amount of batter into each 'channel'. And I couldn't go back and adjust, because I had to remove the can and cup. So sometimes the chocolate would be higher than the yellow, and then when I'd take the cups out they would kind of slop into each other....
Here are the three cooked layers. Henry thought they looked like jack-o-lanterns. I shaved a little off the top of the bottom two layers to make them stack better, and in hopes that it would just be the tops that weren't the correct stripey-ness.
Here they are all assembled, with a lovely Ghirardelli bittersweet ganache in between the layers. 
And here's the final frosted version. I took it from this angle, which is less lopsided than the other side.
And here is the less-than-perfect checkerboard cake, once cut. For some reason the entire center layer looks completely chocolate. It tasted yummy, none-the-less.
I will not attempt checkerboard again unless I get the right tool. Here's a photo of some of the clean-up...
And the rest of the clean up...
I think I'll have a piece of leftover cake right now!
2 comments:
looks tasty from here! like the new biopic!
if i were still blogging (it seems like a bit of a lost cause at this point [sigh]), i would have posted a photo of the lovely layer cake that rob made me for my birthday. it's a great thing that all the decker sibs can make a mean chocolate cake...
i think your cake should win an award for its creative use of cans of various sizes. well done!
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