Birthday Cake

A couple of weeks ago was my birthday. I made my own cake...because I wanted to. I chose chocolate and peanut butter as my inspiration and a giant cupcake pan as my mold. Woohoo!!

Chocolate Cake
From Hershey's

2 cups sugar
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup cocoa
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 egg
1 cup milk
1/2 cup oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup boiling water

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour baking pan(s).
2. Stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil and vanilla; beat on medium speed of mixer 2 minutes. Stir in water. (Batter will be thin.) Pour batter evenly into prepared pans.
3. Bake 30 to 35 minutes or wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes; remove from pans to wire racks. Cool completely.

Cake ingredients ready to be mixed. I chose to use the Hershey's Special Dark Cocoa because I thought a dark chocolate cake would be dreamy (it was a good choice; you should try it).

That's one runny cake batter! It should be moist though, right?

Here is my cake pan. I lost the little sheet that came with it which tells you how to adjust cake recipes to fit this pan (how much to make). I tried to go online to see if I could find such information and ended up just guessing.

I think I underfilled it a little but the final result was just fine.

Peanut Butter Frosting

From here

1 cup powdered sugar

1 cup creamy peanut butter

5 Tbsp unsalted butter, at room temperature

3/4 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 tsp Kosher salt

1/3 cup heavy cream

1. Combine all ingredients except for cream. Beat with an electric mixer on medium low speed until creamy. Add cream and beat on high speed until smooth.

Peanut butter and sugar...this is looking good.

Creamy and dreamy frosting. This is super light and smooth. I could eat it with a spoon.

The two sides of the cupcake all set up.

I got to play with my cake decorating supplies. I haven't really broken them out before so I got ot experiment which was super fun.

The finished product: this was really good. The cake was extremely moist. The flavor of the cake was good but was really a background player to the frosting. This frosting was phenomenal. I'm not really a big frosting eater. It's normally too sweet and dry; a lot of times I will actually eat the cake and skip the frosting. This frosting had awesome texture (light and creamy) and incredible flavor (peanut buttery but not overpowering). It was rich but not so rich that it seemed too much. Seriously, this was the best frosting I've ever tasted in every way.