When I asked my husband what he would like for his birthday cake this year, he thought about it for a bit and then said “Can it have two layers please?”
After further consideration he added that chocolate plus one other flavour would also be nice.
As you can tell he is pretty easy to please, but of course I wanted to make something special for him. Well I have pinned a few chocolate and whiskey cake recipes with him in mind so that seemed like a good start and putting “chocolate and whiskey cake” into google threw up this recipe, the resulting cake pictured had 4 layers and looks beautiful, so that’s what I went with.
When I make my own recipes they don’t always quite turn out as planned, but because I often don’t have a set picture of the finished cake I’m rarely disappointed with how they look. And although my version of this recipe looks fine, I think the original is a lot more stylish, and that is what I was aiming for, so of course I ended up being a bit disappointed.
Chocolate and Whiskey Cake
Mine ended up looking different for a few reasons.
Although I had the right diameter cake tins, they were sandwich tins which were not deep enough to hold the dough. I would have needed 4 and I only had 2! So I ended up using sandwich tins of a size up, and reducing the cooking time because the cakes were thinner as a result. Now I think I may have been able to get away with cutting them in half as instructed, but felt it was a bit risky and was also aware that this would have required more cake filling than the recipe stated because of the increased surface area. So I left it as two layers.
Chocolate and Whiskey Cake in progress
This was the first time I had made salted caramel and it worked fine but took a lot longer than the recipe said to melt the sugar. It also came out a little darker (did I maybe burn the sugar a bit?) and a lot thicker than expected. This made it hard to pour over the cake, and I was afraid that heating it to make it pourable would result in melted off buttercream.
So I chilled the cake before pouring on the caramel, but this seemed to mess with my buttercream texture which ended up looking a little grainy after chilling. Argh!
The whole thing ended up taking longer than expected and because I was hoping it would look more professional I must admit I ended up feeling a bit deflated by the time I was done. I was probably having a blood sugar crash by this point because of the inevitable “testing” of buttercream and salted caramel which did not help…
Chocolate and Whiskey Cake
In any event, my husband loved the cake (which tasted good, though a little sweeter than my personal taste – buttercream AND caramel!!) and asked me to keep the recipe so I will be trying it again at some point (though possibly not before next year).
And I need to warn him that I used all the cheap whiskey (which was lurking in the back of the cupboard for years) making it so it will potentially be an expensive cake next year, if I use the single malt :)
Chocolate and Whiskey Cake
Find the original recipe here: Chocolate and Whiskey Cake
Filed under: Recipes
