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Stardew Valley Chocolate Cake, favored by Abigail, Evelyn, and Jodi. (The latter of whom has an interesting blurb in the book about maybe convincing Kent, Sam, and Vincent to try their hand at making one for one of her birthdays...)
This one, I have A LOT to say about. We have plans to bake this around Valentine's Day and figured we could use a "dry run" now to see if we could learn anything important before then. Turns out, more than we thought.
First challenge: finding the right ingredients and tools. We had to look for bittersweet chocolate, a kind we don't normally use for anything. We had to get a posted cake slicer since a bread knife would not only be too short and unwieldy, but the bottom layers were huge. We also had to get new cake pans of varying sizes: 10, 8 and 5 inches respectively. Then we needed to buy an icing spreader.
Another challenge: 'finely' chopping the bittersweet chocolate that would eventually go into the frosting, which in this case is a chocolate 'ganache'. After chopping the chocolate with knives and cutting boards, we decided to use our food processor, which helped but still took a while due to the nature of chocolate. And this was just for early prep work.
Next, over yesterday, we made the cakes themselves. The batter consisted of a mixture of cocoa powder, butter, and 'strong' coffee, and other dry powdered ingredients like flour, baking powder, etc. Now keep in mind, this is a 3-tiered cake, which means A LOT OF BATTER! With the bowls we had, the mixture, needing to be all done together at once, almost overflowed our largest bowl, but we barely avoided that. Next time, we will use a bowl with over twice the capacity that we just got afterwards.
Next challenge: baking the 3 cakes in the different pans. After dusting and greasing the pans and laying some parchment paper, we were luckily able to fit them in the oven all at once. But we had to use a lot of timing because different-sized cakes require different cooking durations. Plus, even after taking them out of the oven, they each had to be left on a wire rack for a while, inverted after another while and removed from the pans. That required different timings, too.
And that was just day 1. Today, we did the ganache frosting and assembled the full cake. That required warming some heavy cream and using it to melt the chocolate we cut previously. Then it had to sit for an hour, then chill in the fridge, all while being mixed at certain times until it reached a very thick consistency. Once the time came to trim the cakes and assemble them, we also had to cut the cakes in half for a total of 6 layers.
Despite the recipe calling for a certain amount of ganache, it was actually just barely enough for each layer, and some of the top layers got less than the book thought we could use. Turns out, ganache is so thick and sticky it's hard to use it all. And we had to sprinkle semi-sweet chocolate chips every other layer. We also had some spare chocolate chips from the holidays to decorate the outside with.
Finally, the cake has a cute little maraschino cherry on top. I decided that I'd take pictures with and without the stem. Final height: 8.5 inches!
Now for the million-dollar question: will it fit under the glass dome? LMAO
