{"id":152028,"date":"2012-06-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gracious-khorana.45-76-20-142.plesk.page\/peanut-butter-and-chocolate-cake-perfect-imperfection-a-pbr-cake-stand\/"},"modified":"2023-06-26T17:13:57","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T17:13:57","slug":"peanut-butter-and-chocolate-cake-perfect-imperfection-a-pbr-cake-stand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/2012\/06\/peanut-butter-and-chocolate-cake-perfect-imperfection-a-pbr-cake-stand.html","title":{"rendered":"Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cake: Perfect Imperfection"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I prefer a life lived in. Real perfection is necessarily imperfect: it\u2019s polymorphous, in flux, crooked, and warm, cluttered and lopsided. You won\u2019t find it in a catalogue. That contrived, mechanical sort of perfection is impossibly dull. Rather, you\u2019ll find it in spiraling\u00a0cells, in organisms\u00a0multiplying, unfurling, evolving, wilting, copulating, decomposing, and dying. Seas and mall courts alike teem with it.\u00a0Prime numbers self-contain it. It is things as they are. For me perfection is to live in the\u00a0imperfect now, a now that is populated by mad curls, cast iron, cracked tea cups, whole milk, scars, asymmetry, dirty dishes, anxiety, crow\u2019s feet, four letter words, chicken hearts, finger nail clippings, and, in this particular instance, a homely cake on an upended beer glass cake stand.<\/p>\n

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This roughly hewn cake was my very first cake, peanut butter layers with a ganache-like dark chocolate frosting and a sprinkling of fleur de sel. Nothing ground breaking here, just peanut butter and chocolate. It was a baby cake, 4\u2033 across, and perfect in its imperfection. I\u2019ve baked flourless chocolate cakes in bain-maries<\/i>, angel food, and cupcakes before. But never a real<\/i>\u00a0cake, which is, as every southerner knows, a layer cake.<\/p>\n

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This attempt was, as you can see, far from pristine. Some of the icing seeped into the center through what I assume was a crack in one of my layers and not some frosting worm hole in space-time, but as far as outlines and rough drafts go, this was a stalwart little cake. A small slice went a long way, a good thing for a confection of diminutive size. Its size lead me the d.i.y. Pabst Blue Ribbon\u00a0chalice\u00a0cake stand because my actual cake stand dwarfed it. So I upended an old PBR glass, stuck a plate on top and declared it a cake stand by the powers invested in me.<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019d never made a layer cake before because they seemed to require a reason, an occasion, une f\u00eate,<\/i>\u00a0and I\u2019d never found any such occasion previously. Birthday cakes growing up were the province of Sugar, my grandmother, and for the majority of my twenties birthdays were celebrated with copious amounts of booze and bad decisions making, not cheerful afternoon cake baking. Thankfully I no longer celebrate the passage of time with death knells and banshee wails, and\u00a0I baked this tiny cake as a test in my search for the inimitable peanut butter & chocolate cake for Patrick\u2019s birthday this weekend.\u00a0He made an off-handed comment about peanut butter & chocolate being awesome (probably in the form of calling people who don\u2019t like said combination \u201cawful philistines\u2026\u201d) which I took to heart, leading me on this quest for the perfect peanut butter & chocolate cake.<\/p>\n

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Being a virgin to layer cake baking, it seemed best to do a few experiments before the final cake, which I plan on being three eight inch layers. The need to test led me to tiny cake making, which was an epiphany in and of itself because\u00a0there really needn\u2019t be any special occasion for a tiny cake. It\u2019s a Tuesday afternoon sort of cake. We had small slices of it after dinner and with coffee for a few days. It proved to be the perfect size for a household of two with a penchant for sweets in moderate moderation. Tiny layer cakes shall henceforth be a part of my \u201cno special occasion required\u201d baking\u00a0repertoire.<\/p>\n

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I was very fortunate to find, on my first attempt, my ideal chocolate frosting. It\u2019s fudgelike, bittersweet, and\u00a0reminiscent\u00a0of a good truffle. It would play nice with cayenne pepper. The salt? Critical. That detail takes what would otherwise be a rather rote cake and renders it bright & interesting.\u00a0My next experiment will involve peanut butter cake batter with peanut butter frosting between the layers and this chocolate frosting on the outside so as to achieve even more peanut butteryness. My hope is that this will be the keen little cro-magnon cake in what will be an evolution of a great many cakes to come.<\/p>\n

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