G. Knerd

I thought I had posted something on Monday about this, but apparently the app I installed on my new phone did not agree with me about said post.  Sorry about that, I won’t be trying that procedure again any time soon.

Anyway, I haven’t had much time to knit, and what time I have had has been spent on the Wedding blanket for Erica which I can’t really show you all much about (it was much easier to blog about a Wedding blanket when I was sure the recipient would never ever even pretend to like a knitting blog).  However, Monday was my birthday, and I did take some time to bake myself a super delicious salted caramel chocolate cake.

It started with a couple super rich, amazingly moist cakes, which I cut into two layers so there were four total layers of cake.

That, by the way, is a pre-sliced cake.  Each layer ended up being less than an inch thick.  Then, of course, there was ganache…lots of ganache.

When I started assembling the cake, the ganache was actually almost up to the brim of that bowl.  But the thing that I love most about this cake, the thing that had me drooling for more?

The caramel.

This was the first time I’d made a caramel sauce from scratch, and I was amazed at how fun it was.  Basically, you heat sugar syrup until just before it burns, then dump cream into it.  The steam nearly burned my hand,  but the bubbles were incredible – a great lesson in thermal dynamics and what happens when you mix something rather cold with something ridiculously hot.

Each cake layer had a layer of ganache spread on it, followed by a ring of ganache to hold the caramel in and then a thick layer of caramel sauce, finally topped with a sprinkling of salt.  It looked like art, and I’m not exactly sure how I managed to assemble the full thing without eating half of it or drooling onto it (I will not make any assertions about my drool level in general, just that it did not get on or in the cake in any way).

Really, the worst part about this cake was the fact that I’m not a good cake decorator and I didn’t get any decorating icing, so after the cake was frosted – with ganache – I tried to do something pretty and ended up making something silly looking.

However, it still tasted divine.  If I hadn’t spent a little time realizing that each slice has about half a stick of butter in it, I’d be making this every week.  Luckily for my waistline, however, I’ve decided that this is to be a very-special-occasions-only kind of cake.  Like, you know, my birthday.  I think my birthday should absolutely always have a cake like this served at it, don’t you?

(Note: for those of you who are alarmed by this extremely non-knitting-related post, don’t worry.  I have no intentions of turning this into a food blog, nor do I really cook/bake anything special all that often anyway.  Normal knitting related posts will resume their normal weekly schedule on Monday.  I’ll finally be getting around to blocking the border for the first Wedding blanket – you know, the one that I’ve never actually laid out next to the blanket it is intended for?  While I don’t have any reason to believe that there will be any problems, the Knitting Fates really do like to kick you when you assume something will just work.  I’ve been assuming for months, so…

…okay, basically, I’m screwed.  Tune in next week for the details on how it goes.)