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This weekend I went home for my best friends birthday. I am always the one out of my group of friends who is put in charge of making the cake. ( I hope it would be obvious by now why this is!) Generally, my friend requests carrot cake, as it may very well be the best thing I make. However this year I heard not one peep from her regarding the cake so I decided to mix things up. I wanted to do something smore’s themed, since that is one of her favorite sweet treats, but I didn’t want the cake to be too be overwhelming. I wanted it to be a balanced and simple cake that would truly concentrate on intense flavor. My mother suggested to me the milk chocolate layer cake from Prince Arthur flour, and I thought it was truly stellar. The cake itself was a little dry, as it is hard to make a truly moist chocolate cake, let alone a milk chocolate cake. I think though I had over baked the cake a little bit and it would have been much better with a few less minutes in the over.

 

The icing though was what truly made the cake – and it could not have been simpler. Two of the layers were simply marshmallow fluff, straight out of the jar. I worried that this would have been too sweet but it worked nicely with the crumbly cake layers. The other layers, and the icing on the outside of the cake was a milk chocolate ganache icing. With only two ingredients this was definitely the easiest icing that I have ever made and it was also the most delicious. Really I can’t stress enough how amazing this icing was, but remember with only two ingredients quality goes a long way. The importance of good quality milk chocolate is vital to the delicious integrity of the recipe.

 

Also a disclaimer is needed for this post. Although everything was baked by me, my mother was the one who photographed the cake. She has been really enjoying learning about food photography lately and I was more than happy to let her profile my cake since I was baking it at home – so I hope you enjoy the top quality pictures in this post!

Recipe

 

Ingredients

 

Cake

¼ cup of vegetable oil

4 Tablespoons of softened butter

¾ cup of sugar

2 large eggs

6 ounce of melted milk chocolate

¼ teaspoon of salt

2 ½ cups of unbleached cake flour

1 ¼ teaspoon of baking soda

¼ cup dried whole milk

¼ cup of all purpose cocoa powder

1 cup of buttermilk

 

Filling

2 cups of marshmallow fluff

 

Ganache

12 ounces of milk chocolate

1 cup of heavy cream

 

Directions

 

Preheat the over to 350 degrees f and spray to 8inch round cake pans well with non-stick cooking spray. Place oil, butter, sugar and eggs into your mixer and beat on a medium high speed fro about two minutes. Next add in the melted milk chocolate, salt, flour, baking soda, vanilla, dried whole milk, cocoa powder and half of the buttermilk. Beat again on a medium high speed for a minute. Stop and scrape down the sides. Add the rest of the buttermilk and mix for 30 more seconds.

 

Pour the batter equally into both pans and bake for 18-24 minutes. When a skewer comes out dry with only a few crumbs then the cakes are ready

 

For the icing, place the milk chocolate in a heat proof bowl and set aside. Place the cream in a pot on the stove and heat until almost boiling, stirring occasionally. Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and stir until everything is melted. Let the ganache cool in the fridge for about half an hour, until the mixture has thickened slightly (to the consistency of chocolate pudding). Remove from the fridge and using the whisk attachment on a mixer whip the ganache until it is light and fluffy, about 3-5 minutes.

 

When cakes are cool, slice them in half so that you have four layers and ice the layers alternately with the icing and the marshmallow fluff, using a cup of fluff on the alternating layers. A tip to make sure the fluff doesn’t spill out over the edge and mess up the icing of the sides of the cake is to pipe a ring of ganache around the edge of the fluff layers.

 

Once the entire cake is iced, serve and enjoy!

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