Spur of the moment cake!

I know, great picture.

Aaaand I'm back! Finally after broken promises I am happy to say I have found my card reader and am back and ready to go! =] I have to admit, I have missed my blog so much, but I have missed baking even more. I was definitely in a bit of a rut which lead me to stay out of the kitchen for some crazy reason, especially when baking makes me so crazy happy! Anyways enough about me, how have you all been? So my first post back was supposed to be mini chocolate strawberry buttercream cupcakes...but I have realized that NONE of the pictures turned out.

See? Pretty awful

To be honest, the cupcakes were nothing special, so we will just pretend those never happened. The cake I am going to post about was a total spur of the moment. Our friends had invited us over this afternoon, and instead of leaving right away, I had to bake them a cake first!



I had leftover buttercream from the not-to-be-mentioned cupcakes, so I knew I could fill a cake with it. I did go down some "new" territory with this cake though....chocolate! I really don't do too many chocolate cakes as everyone I usually bake for prefers yellow or white. Also I had not made a chocolate buttercream before, but I knew this cake was the time to try it. Also, I had a new tip that I was dying to try out, but we'll get to that later.
So I made 2 different cakes, a milk chocolate and a dark chocolate. To show how much I do not read directions...APPARENTLY when you do a boxed cake, it is enough to fill two round pans. However, if you are a bit directionally challenged like me, you read right over that part and pour all of the batter into one bowl. No big deal, except that you end up with a cake that looks like this:

Thank goodness for knives!

Oh man this picture makes me laugh. Typical me. oh well, I cut the excess off and no one had to know. (well, that isn't true anymore I guess) I decided to cut each of the cakes into two layers to make it four layers total. I alternated the flavors so it went dark chocolate, milk chocolate, dark and then milk.

First ever batch of chocolate buttercream!

Strawberry and chocolate buttercream

Hot 'n fresh outta the oven!!

I feel like I am becoming sort of a pro at flipping the cakes out of the pans =]

So steamy

All filled and stacked. I really liked the subtle color difference

I saw a cake from IAMBAKER and really wanted to try and do it myself. So I did a crumb coat and grabbed my new fancy tip and went on my way.

 Ok, so I need to figure out what the deal is with this tip. It is supposed to make nice ruffles, but the frosting was shooting out in like three streams making it impossible for me to do that design. Plus I was in a hurry so I just said screw it and moved on to something else. I did end up doing it on the bottom and top (sort of) and it looked sort of cool and swirly. Meh, I'll do some more practice with this tip and hopefully figure it out! The cake itself was decent. I am not the biggest chocolate cake fan, but I really like the chocolate buttercream a lot. It was a lot less sweet than the non-chocolate and I think it really balanced out the sweetness of the cake. Plus we ate a piece with a couple scoops of vanilla ice cream which always makes everything better! =]