Too Much Peanut Butter

So I really love chocolate cake, and I have been on this quest to find the perfect chocolate cake with a balance of moistness, flavor, and utter deliciousness...  So far I have found one cake/icing combo that I absolutely love.... I found the recipe online, made it, and loved it.  It had just the right taste for a chocolate cake, and the icing was wonderfully delicious.  Unfortunately i never bookmarked the page where i found the recipe (I know, dumb right!!??), so I have since been trying in vain to find this recipe again.  I was having very little luck finding the same recipe so I thought I would deviate from the path a bit, and try a chocolate and peanut butter combo.  I mean chocolate and peanut butter are a classic combo right, so what could go wrong??  Turns out a lot!  I made the cake exactly according to the recipe, even though I knew it wasn't going to be as good as the last one based on some of the ingredients, or should I say, lack thereof.  The cake was ok, but not as moist, or as chocolaty tasting or delicious as the last, but the cake was far from the problem.  On a side note, I used homemade whipped cream as a filling between the layers and that actually turned out to be a nice surprise.  It tasted pretty good and held up well (I always refrigerate my cakes so that might help as well).  Anyway, back to the problem....  which was of course the frosting.  Now call me a glutton for punishment, but for some reason I chose to follow the recipe for a frosting that i've made before and knew i didn't like from the first time around.  I guess my thinking was that perhaps i just did something wrong the first time, or it was all in my head.... yeah, not so much.  Ok, so here's the part where i post the recipe...  try at your own risk.  For those of you who really like the taste of peanut butter you may actually LOVE this recipe, but for me it was just too much peanut butter and too rich for me.  Anyway, i got the recipe for the cake at http://annies-eats.com/2008/07/23/reese%E2%80%99s-cup-chocolate-peanut-butter-cake/ which posts a lovely picture of this cake complete with miniature Reese’s peanut butter cups, my version isn't decorated that way as i didn't have any Reese’s at the time, so i just used some left-over butter cream from a previous cake and decorated with some flowers and rosettes.  The icing recipe was on the previous website, but was actually a recipe from Ina Garten from foodnetwork...  I do not recommend this recipe unless you like really rich peanut butter flavor...not for me!

Here are the recipes:

A Practice Cake---How does it taste?

This cake is not the first, and hopefully not the last cake i have done, but I figured it was about time to get something posted on here!  I actually decorated this cake while taking a cake decorating class, so it was more practice for decorating than really baking anything in particular.  The flowers really have no purpose to them, other than that i was practicing how to make them, and the basket weave is the first one I've ever done.  The cake itself was just a store bought cake mix, which very nicely made two 9in rounds, and between the layers i put chocolate pudding.  I can't remember off hand, but i believe the cake mix was a yellow cake, but it also could have been french vanilla.... i should write these things down.  Typically I would make a cake from scratch, but i was running late, and made the cake the morning of my class, and really didn't have time to go through making a cake, and making icing, and frosting it.... you get the point.  Well anyway, I have no idea how this cake tasted because upon arriving home from my class my husband promptly took one look at the cake and said that we should give it to the neighbors (who had previously welcomed us to the neighborhood by bringing us a very sticky, gooey, and very sweet concoction which i do not even know the name for but was quite good---i will have to get the recipe sometime and try it out!).  So the neighbors got the cake, but at least i got some somewhat decent pictures of it before i had to hand over my very first basket weave masterpiece.  I do wish i would have gotten to taste it, because i had never used pudding as a filling before and was curious to see how it turned out; in hindsight, giving away a cake in which you have done some experimenting probably isn't the best way to make a first impression, but i am hopeful that it was at least edible enough that the kids could manage to eat it all, hey kids eat anything right...well mine do anyway :-)

What to blog??

Since I am new to this blogging thing, and have very limited knowledge of HTML (I will have to do a crash course sometime soon), it may take me a little bit to get this site up and running.  To be brief, the main goal of this site is to have a place for me to showcase any attempts I have done at baking and/or decorating my creations.  I know my title says baking, but i am not limiting myself to just delightful creations that are spawned from a 350 degree oven; I may throw in a few garden variety stovetop masterpieces as well (they always start out that way anyway, and quite often end up being choked down by my easy to please husband and my 3yr old who is not shy about telling me "that's gross!").