Chocolate cakes weekend

Apart from the 2 chocolate cakes that I baked last week, I also baked a few more chocolate cakes:

1. a stacked cake for my anniversary, my sister-in-law's anniversary and my father-in-law's birthday;
2. a 6 inch chocolate cake for our tea time treat; and 
3. another 6 inch cake to bring to my office. 

All in all, I actually baked 6 cakes (all chocolate!!) last weekend. I even told my husband that the next cake that I'm gonna bake won't be a chocolate cake (hopefully - my kids loves chocolate cake though).

This was my very first stacked cake - chocolate cake, decorated with white chocolate:

And this was the picture of our 6 inch tea time cake:

I didn't take any picture of the other 6 inch cake that I brought to my office. It's the same chocolate cake, with cookies and cream filling and chocolate ganache icing.

3 tiered cakes

A few months back, when I first started to decorate my cakes, my sister-in-law had requested me to bake a wedding cake for her sister's wedding. The wedding is scheduled for Dec 09, so at that point of time, I still have plenty of times to decide.

I have not decided actually, until the matter was brought up again when we met at my grandma's house last month. I then agreed to bake the cake.

After a lot of thinking, and since my sister-in-law did not specify the type / flavour of the cake or the design required, but had only informed me of the colour theme, purple, I have decided to make chocolate cake with cookies and cream filling, covered with chocolate ganache icing.


So, here's the cakes:

the top tier

the middle tier

the bottom tier

My first tiered cake

I've been dreaming to do tiered or stacked cake for quite some times. Last weekend, I finally managed to pull myself together and finally constructed a tiered cake. My 1st tiered cake to be exact. Original plan was to do a stacked cake, with buttercream decorations.

I baked 2 chocolate cakes (8" and 6") and filled it with cookies and cream. Made Italian Meringue Buttercream (IMBC) earlier that week, but I must have overwhipped the egg-whites. My buttercream felt so soft and cottony, and lumpy when it's cold - not suitable for spreading. Tried to repair the damage but not able to do so. So, to the dustbin it went.

I'm too lazy to work on the sugar syrup to make another batch of IMBC (since I don't have any sugar thermometer, and if the sugar syrup is left too long, it will start to caramelized, and the buttercream will be more yellow that what it was supposed to be) and was thinking to just work on buttercream with no egg whites in it. But the buttercream recipe that contain no egg whites that I've tried before was way too sweet. Wanted to try a different buttercream recipe, but unsure whether it will be overly sweet as well. So, I decided to make chocolate ganache instead to cover the cakes and then try the new buttercream recipe for decoration purpose.

The chocolate cake turns out moist, the cookies and cream filling was delicious, chocolate ganache - yummy, and to my surprise, the buttercream icing was not that sweet.

So, here's the upper tier = covered with chocolate ganache, decorated with buttercream roses, and side decorations using white chocolate.

And here's the bottom tier = covered with chocolate ganache, and decorated with small flowers (design inspired by Yatt from Yatt's Lilkitchen).

And here's my 1st ever tiered cake (using pillars):

For my beloved husband, Happy Birthday Sayang!!