Today's cake I made from a Cook's Illustrated recipe - "Emergency Chocolate Cake." It's adapted from a wartime rationing cake that uses mayonnaise instead of butter and eggs, which is great, because we have neither eggs nor butter. I had to replace the bittersweet chocolate it called for with regular unsweetened Baker's chocolate, and the adapted recipe also called for one egg, so I fudged it with ground flax seed. The box claims that if you add water and let it sit to gel up, flax meal can replace an egg. We'll see. It was supposed to be made in a square 8" pan, which I don't own, so I used two 8" round pans for a layer cake. The frosting is a recipe I found online that calls for 1/4 c. of sour cream, 1 c. chocolate chips, 2 c. powdered sugar, and 1 tsp. vanilla. I used Baker's again, mixed with more powdered sugar and a little milk, and I added 1/2 c. or so of coffee to try to get a really rich dark chocolate flavor. Nailed it! Lovely rich stuff, should have put more between the layers, but I'll think of something to do with the leftovers.
Speaking of leftovers, the green icing is leftovers from Silas' first birthday.
This was stolen from Pinterest. The original pinner used mini cupcakes and a large can, I just went full-sized on the cupcakes and used an 8" cake. I used boxed cake mix for the cake and the cupcakes, and the green frosting is canned frosting with food coloring added, the yellow icing is Cake Mate from a tube. The nose, antennae, and feet are piped melted chocolate chips, and the red and green on the head are 'modeling chocolate,' except that I used generic white chips instead of white chocolate, because it was so much cheaper. Now I have an absurd amount of modeling mostly-wax leftover that I'm not sure what to do with. I had a lot of fun scribbling on the parchment paper to draw all the different foods with caterpillar holes in them, though magic markers + parchment paper doesn't work especially well. Silas didn't mind one way or the other.
