DH had his 42nd birthday this past week, and another friend of ours had his birthday about 4 days after. I haven't baked anything significant in awhile, but being addicted to Pinterest, I had a couple of cakes I wanted to try for both their respective birthdays.
So for DH, a big fan of mint and chocolate, I made the Andes chocolate mint cake that I pinned in September, from the blog Bird on a Cake.
I have a link to the recipe on my blog.I am not great with decorating cakes - so it doesn't look at great as the original pin, but it was a lovely moist cake. I made some minor changes to suit my taste. DH loved it. I thought for sure he would share some with friends at work, as he is not a big cake eater, but he kept it for us to eat and finish over the next several days. It stayed nice and moist, and had really nice flavour so if you like chocolate and mint, I do recommend giving this one a try.
My icing of the cake sucked - but I was proud of how minty green it came out - a combination of Wilton's teal and kelly green gel food colouring. Also of my own will power - There was a pile of Andes mints and I made the entire cake without eating one single mint! Amazing, as I adore those minty chocolate wafers!
For the second cake, I saw the Reese's peanut butter/chocolate cake she had on her blog and had to give that a try - our friend, and DH love chocolate and PB.
I made some changes to the original cake recipe, as they use the same basic cake recipe, and it has a peanut butter buttercream recipe and some peanut flavouring in the ganache. This also turned out lovely and moist. I sent it home with him, but he did let DH have a big slice, as he was salivating over it, and I got a taste and it was quite nice. Another one that I recommend and likely will make again in the future. Maybe in another year!
Man, I wish I still had one more slice, with a big glass of milk in front of me right now!
