Chocolate Overload

 My poor book club. This is what I'm bringing for dinner.

At the end of my Intro to Baking class I was drowning in baked goods. I ended up bring home three cakes one day and had the good sense to freeze two of them. One was a genoise cake which I turned into a tasty trifle at Christmas (resolution for the new year, take pictures of things and also try to take better pictures of things).

The other cake was a devil's food cake. I have never been a fan of devil's foods cake but that may have something to do with the fact that the only form I have had it in is a Snackwells cake/cookie thing. Remember Snackwells? Low fat cookies and such. They were also low on deliciousness.

Since this has been my only experience with this kind of cake I had no idea what to do with it and I also wasn't very excited to try to do something with it.
Enter Christmas.

For Christmas I received many wonderful things. My brother got me this book on a recommendation of a friend of his who is a pastry chef in New York. In this book is a really good looking devil's food cake. It has layers of caramel and dark chocolate ganache. The frosting is dark chocolate ganache coated with toasted cake crumbs. Now who can I make eat this cake? My book club. I hope it is good.

The crumb coating makes the cake look "classy" in my husband's words but I felt it lacked a little something extra. In the book there is a perfectly placed dollop of ganache on top of the cake. I tried to replicate it but it always ended up looking like a turd. I have been wanting to try my hand at making roses so I warmed up the ganache a little and hoped for the best. I don't know if you are supposed to pipe roses out of ganache but I did.

I made 5 roses and they each turned out a little different. The first ones were smaller and tighter since the chocolate was a little cooler. The edges of the petals were rough which I think made kind of a cool effect. The last 2 I did were bigger and softer looking since the chocolate had warmed up while I was using it. After chilling in the fridge for a while I chose one of the bigger ones and stuck it on the middle of the cake. Done and done.