Delicious Anniversary Chocolate Cake Recipe to Bake

October is our anniversary month and we celebrated this past weekend by going out to dinner at our local Texas Roadhouse steakhouse. We didn’t splurge on dessert, as earlier in the day I baked us a chocolate layer cake using an old Family Circle recipe. Let’s bake, dear friends!!!

Abby’s Fabulous Chocolate Cake

After reading through the recipe, I started with buttering my 8″ round cake pans, and adding cut-out parchment circles. Then, buttering and dusting those with flour.

Melting the chocolate for the cake part would have been easy… But, I didn’t have any melting chocolate. (waaaaaa!)

So, I used what I thought would be the equivalent from my stash of dark chocolate pieces. They melted pretty well, all things considered. ;)’ Then you are supposed to let it cool.

IT WOULDN’T COOL! That pan, even after a whole half-hour sitting off the burner, the mixture was still pretty hot.

I put the pan into the freezer, friends! That did it.

After adding in the dry ingredients to the wet, pour into your floured pans. Bake for the required time and adjust to your oven’s temps.

Let pans cool for 20 minutes or so, then loosen around the cakes’ edges with a butter knife. Use a dinner plate, and flip cakes out. Finish cooling turned onto a wire cooling rack.

Make the frosting while waiting for the cakes to cool.

Making the frosting

I missed the step saying that this frosting was supposed to be cooked on the stove in a double-boiler… So I whipped it all up in the mixer and thought we were good.

Except, there were raw egg whites in the frosting batter… After re-reading the recipe, I saw the double-boiler notes (eye roll!), and scraped the batter into a pan and cooked it a bit.

The fluffy batter kinda fell, but at least it was now cooked! 😉

Oddly enough, the frosting tasted just like marshmallows! I think this could be a marshmallow creme recipe, maybe?? (Before it was cooked.)

Assemble your cake with some of the frosting in the middle.

See how the frosting became “crystalized” after cooking? The texture was kind of weird, and it is totally my fault (not the recipe’s!) for making up the frosting the wrong way.

*** To fix that, make a butter cream frosting and replace the original frosting with that instead.

We ate our pieces with some Hershey’s chocolate drizzled over the cake, which helped mask the crystalized frosting snafu.

And the cake tastes wonderful! I still haven’t changed the frosting, but it’s fine.

Recipes don’t always turn out, but this cake looks pretty with its crystals and the flavor is spot-on.

Let me know what kind of snafus you have experienced in your baking or cooking. Have you ever made a homemade pizza and forgotten the tomato sauce? I have! When we were first married, I did that in our first apartment. Soooo bad... 😉 Looking forward to your comments.

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Happy fall baking,