A Rainbow Glitter Dragon German Chocolate Cake
Now, as most of you know, I like to create things in the kitchen, but in all honesty I am not the bestest at food presentation. Most of my edible concoctions are more than a bit beyond passable in the tasty department, but when it comes to garnishment and flair I am no kitchen Liberace. It's just the way it is.
That said, I do love to give food blessings to my pals, in fact, yesterday I was cornered by a bunch of twenty-somethings and grilled as to why I had not brought Brownie Surprise with me. Apparently that dish is a legend among that batch of millennials. Heh. Anyway, one of my dear friends finished her master's program, and as I knew that German chocolate cake is her favorite dish, I decided to craft her a graduation cake.
Most graduation cakes are these beautiful and tasty shrines to cake decorating skill and flair. I'm always impressed with the level of piping and flower making skill utilized when I behold an edible graduation celebration food shrine. The cake that I made my friend was a little bit different.
I started with two 9X13 German chocolate cakes that I baked the night previous. I wanted to craft an edible that was guaranteed to put one into an insulin overload, so I whipped up some homemade toasted pecan coconut frosting, a bowl of chocolate fudge mousse, and a batch of milk chocolate buttercream frosting.
To start with, I covered one of my cookie sheets with some foil, because nothing says frugal fancy like not paying for a cake tray! YAY! After I placed one of the cakes on the bottom, I lined the outer edges with a dam-layer of buttercream. This element is needed to keep the filling at bay. Nothing is worse that a bunch of filling on the loose, everyone would be sticking their fingers in the cake and stuff. Not good.
Next I decided that I wanted to reinforce the buttercream dam with an additional layer of toasted coconut pecan frosting. On it went. And yes, I tasted some, quality control is important...
After my filling holding structuring was complete, I plunked almost two full cups of chocolate fudge mousse filling onto the bottom cake. Just look at that caloric laden pile!
After I was satisfied with the middle of my cake creation, I carefully set the other cake on top of the filling slathered bottom cake. Happiness bloomed in my frosting smattered form as I beheld the progressing food sculpture.
Next, I slathered some chocolate buttercream frosting on the sides, glueing the structure together so to speak. This part of the operation was done to music. I have been digging this song lately:
The top of the cake was to be crowned with my homemade toasted coconut pecan frosting. It takes twelve minutes of stirring to cook, but it tastes so good that it's totally worth all the triceps effort!
My frosting piping skills are about as good as my hair coiffuring skills, but I did take my time and added some stars and swirls to make the cake look a bit pro-fesh-ee-nail.
Then came the fun part. I had some cream cheese frosting leftover from another cake creation project. I had pulled it from the freezer to thaw yesterday morning, and dyed the sweet stuff as vivid of a shade of red as I could achieve with liquid food coloring. This of course meant that my frosting was about the same shade as a Sockeye salmon's flesh, but I kind of liked it. My friend loves dragons, so I free hand drew a dragon on the cake and just for fun I made it a glitter sprinkle dragon because I could. This amused me for some reason. Oh, and they weren't really sprinkles, they are actually called nonpareils, but I find that everything that gets sprinkled out of a can is called a sprinkle round here.
And here we have it, the end result. It is by no means fancy, refined, or even close to masterful, but oh my lands did it taste good. I'm still full! And happy, kind of like that pink, er, red glitter dragon on the surface...
And as always, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's German chocolate cake component covered iPhone.
