White Chocolate Raspberry Cake

So it has been a little while since my last post, but I have good excuses! No such thing!! I've been working like crazy, and even on my days off I have been really busy so there hasn't been much time for me to be cooking, but a fabulous opportunity presented itself yesterday: My Mother's 50th 29th Birthday Celebration! So I was incredibly busy yesterday because I was in charge of desserts. I made three different desserts... A fruity, a chocolate and a chocolate fruity. This post will be "The Fruity," my next post will be "The Chocolate Fruity" and then I won't do a post for "The Chocolate" because it was just a boxed brownie mix with chocolate chips added, nothing fancy!

But yes! My mother's favorite fruit is Raspberry. She loves raspberry EVERYTHING... And she LOVES white chocolate. Now, at the Bakery where I work, they make a White Chocolate Raspberry Cake. While I have never had it, I've always wanted to try it. White chocolate cake with a raspberry jam filling and whipped icing. Now, this seems like the perfect dessert for my mother on her birthday, but the cake where I work costs a pretty penny even with my discount, so I decided to tackle this delectable dessert on my own, and ended up saving a TON (which is quite the goal of this blog, right? Being able to learn to cook great food with using a college student's resources, one of which is a very limited income.)

So first I had to do some research, and I found the recipe I wanted to use HERE via The Herta Household Herald. I found it by google image searching "white chocolate raspberry cake," which is generally what I do when I am looking for a specific recipe.

So now that I have my recipe, let's get started!


My ingredients list!
1 box of white cake mix* <--- I chose to use Pilsbury Moist Supreme in Classic White. I always choose this brand when I can because the cake has a cup of pudding mix in it to make it suuuper moist and delicious.
3 egg whites (in the bowl. If you are wondering why they are in a bowl, I read here that you should always use room temperature eggs when baking!**
1 1/3 cups water (not pictured)
2 TBSP cooking oil
5 oz. white baking chocolate
2 16 oz containers of cream cheese frosting
1 18 oz jar of raspberry jam

As you can see, I strayed a bit from the recipe on the web site, which calls for only one can of the frosting (but I think that's because she made homemade buttercream to go on the outside of the cake, because 1 can is definitely not enough for the filling AND for the outside. Also, this recipe called for preserves while I used jam, because I'm not a fan of raspberry seeds... And the jam was SO tasty.

* I know! Using a baking mix is SO taboo in the baking world, but for a cheap college students, it's so much easier to spend $.98 on a baking mix than spend $10.00 on ingredients to bake a cake, which I most-likely won't have super proper-storage containers for and all of that. It's just easier and more cost-effective to use a mix, PLUS-- The people who I am (and will be) cooking for aren't really going to care if I use a boxed mix. Now... When I am in my own home with a family and a fully functioning kitchen that only I will be using, then MOS DEF will I be baking cakes and all other such things from scratch (or attempting to, anyways) but for now, mixes will do!
** I had never tried to bake cakes with room temperature eggs before. I tried to with the Oreo Cake but I don't think I let them sit long enough. These ones sat for quite a while, and when the cake came out of the oven, I didn't have those strange mounds that I get when I bake cakes normally, which was pretty awesome!


The first task you have is to separate your eggs. I'd never had to separate eggs before, and while one of them didn't come out so pretty, I just thought that the separated eggs looked really neat just chillin' in their shells.


After separating your eggs, combine the mix, oil, water and egg whites into a bowl. Here it is, looking particularly gruel-ish.


Then, using a mixer, (which I never used to use, but LOVE now) mix on LOW until ingredients are damp, and then mix on MEDIUM for 2 minutes until the mix is nice and smooth. I never used to use a mixer, but when I started with this recipe, I noticed how much more smooth the batter came out. It seemed to have a much better texture, and when the cake came out of the oven it was lighter and fluffier and much better than cakes turn out when I mix the batter by hand!


I think cake batter smells so heavenly, and I would probably sit there and eat it with a spoon for however long I could go without getting sick from all the sweetness!


The next step is to melt your white chocolate squares. My method of choice is breaking up the cute little bars in half and put them in a glass bowl, then microwave on Power 7 for 30 seconds, stirring until it is all nice and melted.


Ahhhh, perfection! It was smooth and creamy and smelled AMAZING and was not scorched!


So add your melted white chocolate into your batter, mix again and then pour evenly into your pans. I used 2 9-inch pans. Set the oven for 30 minutes and let it bake.


The cakes were beautiful when they came out of the oven, however they were pretty difficult to get out of the pans. I greased the pans long before I even started to make the mix, so it might have dried, or the white chocolate may just be averse to sticking to the pan! I'm not sure, but we loosened them up pretty well, let them sit in the pans on the rack for about 45 minutes before taking them out, and then carefully pried them out of the pans to cool for a little while longer.

After the cakes were cooled, I mixed up the filling for the middle of the layers.


The filling for the cake is quite simple. A cup of raspberry jam and a cup of cream cheese frosting. In hindsight, I should have chilled both the frosting and the jam before I mixed them, because the filling was far too liquidy. However, it tasted ahhhhhhmazing. My sister and my father both ate the leftover with spoons straight from the bowl. They loved it, which was great! But now I had to figure out a way to solve the dilemma of super-liquidy filling... So I pulled out my bakery knowledge for this one.


I learned how to make dams in a cake by watching the decorators at the bakery. With our caramel cakes, and whenever they fill a cake with ganache, a dam of frosting has to be placed around the edge of the cake to keep the liquid from leaking out all over the place. Mine isn't very pretty, but it wasn't going to be seen, so I figured it was OK. Once again, I should have used chilled frosting, but I wasn't thinking, so I filled a sandwich bag with the leftover frosting from the first can and created a dam around the border of the cake.


Unfortunately, the combination of liquidy filling and room-temperature frosting was not a good one, and there were a few breeches. It was around this time that I realized I could put the cake in the refridgerator to firm everything up, so in it went!


A few hours later, I pulled the cake out to find it still in a semi-liquid consistency, but not at all near what it was previously and figured it was OK to ice... You can see the pure desire in my sister and I's faces at the thought of getting to devour this amazing cake in a few hours. :)


This is the finished product!

I carefully iced the outside of the cake with (most) of the remaining can of cream cheese frosting. There was about one or two tablespoons left in the can when I was finished. Some of the filling continued to leak out and turned the icing slightly purple, but it was still very pretty!

I spooned some of the extra raspberry jam into a sandwich bag and cut the corner off and used it in a spiral pattern around the cake, then just dragged a butter knife through to create a spider web look.


Due to the amount of people in attendance to my mother's party, we could not cut the cake like a pie, and instead cut it like cross-hatch style, which I figured would NOT be enough cake but WOW, was I wrong! I Did it 4 slices one direction and crossed it with 3 cuts the other direction, and the pieces were still HUGE. Everyone was satisfied with the amount of cake they had, and we even had 2 pieces left over! It looked gorgeous, and everyone at the party really seemed to enjoy it. We kept it in the refridgerator, and the filling sort of seeped into the layers of cake and made it sweet and fruity without the white chocolate being too overpowering.


I found that this recipe was pretty simple to do, but I learned a lot from my mistakes with now knowing to use chilled ingredients instead of room temperature so I can have a little more control over them! Haha.

Thanks for reading! Until next time!

Chocolate Covered Oreo Cake

So Father's Day was yesterday, which in my family always means that dad gets to do whatever he wants to do that day. My dad spent his morning playing golf, then went to church, then spent the rest of his day relaxing and watching the sweet golf tournament that was on television. Father's Day ALSO means that there will be a fabulous meal, followed by a rather decadent dessert, which is how I got roped into this whole mess.

We decided to get dinner from this Chinese restaurant that we love, but I volunteered to make a dessert for the family since I'm on this cooking kick. So I set off to scour the blogs and search for something that would please my papa's palate (aka: chocolate). I came upon the most awesome recipe ever.

Dine and Dish, found via my favorite web site, Food Gawker, makes the most amazing Oreo Cake I have ever seen. Sure, you buy a cookies and cream ice cream cake and pop some Oreos on top and call it an Oreo cake, but this one by far was most holy in the land of Oreo Cakes.

I would have taken more pictures, but my older sister was helping me and we were having far too much fun trying to remove the cream cheese from the electric mixer beaters to remember our cameras until the process was nearly complete, but here are the ones I do have!


Here are our two 9-inch round chocolate cakes. I used a Devil's Food store bought cake mix which is what the recipe called for (and I have never before made a cake "from scratch" and didn't want to mess this one up!). However, the cake came out a little dry, which was pretty disappointing. For super-moist cake mix, I would recommend Betty Crocker. She's got some sweet pudding-cake mixes that just make the cake come out perfectly moist every time. The dryness of the kind that we used, at least for me, really detracted from the overall taste of the cake.


Next we have the filling, which is cream cheese, sugar, whipped cream and crushed oreos. Let me just tell you to be really careful when you try to use a mixer with cream cheese. The stuff we used wasn't quite soft enough yet, so it got all sorts of stuck inside the beater, which was no bueno for me. I had to scrape it out and it got really annoying at the end. However, it did soften up a little bit and was flying out all over the place, so that's always good, right? Anyways, this is the finished product. It was sweet, creamy and chock-full of delicious pieces of double-stuffed oreos! (Which my sister and I thought would be a fabulous idea since who would choose regular oreos over double stuffed? But we soon learn that crushing double stuffed oreos is difficult because the cream sticks to your bag and is just such a mess!)


Then we made this delicious chocolate dip, which is melted butter and melted baking chocolate. The recipe said 2 minutes to melt it, but we did it in 30 second increments 3 times, so only a minute and a half to get it completely melted. This stuff was one of the best parts of the cake, as when it cooled, it created this delicious ganache-like shell over top of the cake. Yummm.


Here is the finished product! To assemble the cake, you take the bottom layer and lay it top-down on your dish, then cover the top surface with your cream filling, then place the 2nd layer top-up. After you are sure that the layers aren't going to slide apart, you take your cooled chocolate dip and poured it over the top. I poured it all in the center, then smoothed it around with a spatula to get it to drip down the sides. It got a little messy, and if I want to try that again I should probably do it when the chocolate is a little less viscous. It kinda globbed down instead of ran down. But we learn from our mistakes, right? For the topping, on Dine and Dish, they used regular crushed oreos, but my sister and I were tired of the gooey mess that made, so I decided to take 6 oreos and put them in the almighty Magic Bullet and ran it for about 15 seconds to get these amazing super light and powdery crumbs that I just sprinkled over the top. If you have a magic bullet and ever need to make an oreo crust, or Oreo Truffles, I totally recommend using double-stuffed oreos and blending them up because the cream helps it stick together really well. But again, I digress.


And here it is with a nice, tasty slice taken right out of it. I have to admit, the cake was pretty darn good. The chocolate dip on the top plus the oreo crumbs were a great combination, and the filling was sweet but not overly so like the filling of regular oreos are. I was very pleased with the results, except for the dry cake.

My family all loved it, though! I am a little critical of myself, but that's alright.

So I've found my mistakes and things I would like to improve on for this (rather cheap) recipe:
- Use a more moist cake mix
- Soften cream cheese ALL THE WAY to make mixing easier
- Pour the chocolate dip before it gets too thick, or create a border around the top to hold it in and keep it from running down the sides cause it looks kinda sloppy
- Double stuffed oreos may or may not be the best idea for this recipe

And things that I LOVED about this recipe and how it turned out:
- The dip and oreo combination
- The light sweetness of the filling
- The simplicity of preparing this recipe
- How cost-effective it was. (Granted we had most of these ingredients already in the house, but we bought cake mix, a huge tub of whipped cream, the package of oreos and the Baker's chocolate for $10.00 which I feel is a pretty good deal, considering ordering a cake would be about $25.00)

And once again, you can find the recipe for this cake HERE

Thanks for reading!