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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Made - from - scratch Chocolate Cheetah Cake

Hello, all! I've been on a bit of a hiatus as of late, but hopefully, I'll have a few more projects trickling in as the season goes on (it is that pumpkin time of year, after all!)

Today is my good friend, Leigh Ann's birthday. We had a celebration for her over the past weekend, and I'm very proud to share this cake for two reasons: 1) I made a successful, super-moist chocolate cake from scratch and 2) I made my first cheetah print cake!

The recipe is from Taste of Home and can be found here. The recipe is as follows:
  • 2 c AP Flour
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 2 tsp baking soda (don't get those two mixed up, like I usually do!)
  • 3/4 c baking cocoa
  • 2 c sugar
  • 1 c canola oil (not a healthy cake, but moist!)
  • 1 c brewed coffee
  • 1 c milk
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
1) Preheat oven to 325 and grease 2 -8" pans.
2) Sift together the dry ingredients into your mixer's bowl and turn on low for a few seconds to combine. In a separate bowl, mix together the coffee, milk, and oil.
3) Add the coffee mixture into the dry mixture and mix at medium for 1 minute. Then add eggs and vanilla. Beat 2 more minutes. **The batter will be super thin-- just trust it!**
4) Pour batter into two 8" pans (the batter fits perfectly into these-- no boil over!) and bake for 25-30 minutes.
5) Cool cakes for 10 minutes in pans, then turn them out onto a cooling rack.
See? Two perfectly moist cakes. Yum!

To decorate, I mixed some golden yellow vanilla buttercream and frosted the cake. Then I pinched together different sized blobs of black and brown fondants to create cheetah spots.
I made sure that the black fondant peeked out around the edge of each spot.
Then I repeated until the whole cake was covered in spots.

Leigh Ann is a huge fan of pink, so of course I had to add some pink elements. I decided to add pink roses at the top and some pink white chocolate numbers.
Here's a bit of detail on the top...
Leigh Ann liked the cake and she was totally taken by surprise because she didn't know about it! :) And I must say, this chocolate cake recipe is definitely a keeper!

Happy birthday, Leigh Ann!!

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