hey! that girl can cook!

I wouldn't say I'm the world's great at-home chef. Not by a long shot. So far I have found that I'm really good at following a recipe, but when it comes to creating things on my own...yeah that's never going to happen, and I'm ok with that. Hope the HWH is...

Anyways, for Valentine's day I set out to copy Bakerella and make a 14 layer chocolate cake. The short story? It was delicious and took 6 hours. But short stories never were my specialty, so let's dig in, shall we?

First of all, how is a recipe made delicious? Copious amounts of butter, of course. Six sticks to be exact.

That got mixed with a bunch of other things, including what I refer to as the tower of flour. This is what four cups of flour sifted four times looks like. Beautiful if I do say so myself.

 

Mix, mix, mix with lots and lots of things. The recipe can be found here 

After everything was mixed and the fourteen pans (aluminum disposable lined with parchment and flour as prescribed by Ms. Bakerella herself) were in the oven (not all at once of course) I set to making the chocolate ganache (also known as the near Chocolate Disaster) and the whipped chocolate buttercream. 

So...the near disaster. You see, as the cocoa powder/butter/sugar/evaporated milk mixture was warming up on my stovetop I went across the kitchen and set to mixing the butter/cocoa powder/milk/powdered sugar together to create the buttercream. One second the ganach was a pile of mush, the next it looked something like this:

That, friends, is just what it looks like. Chocolate about to bubble over and create a huge, ginormous mess all over my stovetop. That would have ruined my life. Or at least my week. But luckily I looked in time and removed it from the heat just milliseconds before the paneth runeth over.

Once that crisis was diverted I could focus my attention again on the buttercream that was perking up just perfectly...

 

Once the cakes were all baked it was time to layer them with the ganache. I wish I had let the ganache harden up just a little more before I had started to layer them, it was still a little runny, but it was getting close to game time so...lessons learned and all that.

Cake, ganache, cake, ganache, cake ganache, blah blah blah. Then covered with a very thick coating of buttercream. I let it set up for about an hour before slicing into it...

 

YUM!!