I needed some ingredients and was too lazy to shop on Friday or Saturday (plus there were things scheduled, like a graduation party and a horse race), so I didn't start until Sunday morning. Making the cake batter was not too difficult and I thought I could do the baking while working on some other chores. I only have one round cake pan, as it turns out, and I needed at least three layers. The recipe says not to worry because the batter will be fine waiting its turn in the bowl. And it was!
But (and boy-howdy!), I messed up the baking. Since the recipe is written for people who have multiple round pans (read: sane people), it suggested baking times for different numbers and diameters of round pans, but not exactly what I had. I ended up guessing how long to bake mine, and I was wrong by about 20 minutes. My cake had started to pull away from the edge of the pan, and I only had a few crumbs stuck to the tester when I tried the center, so that seemed all right. The second thing I did wrong was not let the pan cool long enough before trying to get the baked cake out (remember, I only had the one pan so I was kind of in a hurry to get on to the next layer).
The first cake was really hard to get out (should have been a clue) and then only the top finally flopped out, missing the cooling rack by about half and leaving the bottom still in the pan. A not-quite-cooked chocolate cake makes a mess when it falls pretty much in a heap on the counter.
With the second cake, I baked it a little longer (it looked the same as the first when I took it out) and again failed to cool it enough, so I had a second flop. The third one I finally did correctly, with a baking time almost twice as long as the first cake and I remembered to cool it a full 15 minutes before attempting to extract it. That used up all the batter, so I washed up and had an hour or two of distraction, feeling pretty unimpressed about this cake.
I almost threw in the towel at this point. Stupid cake!
However, the flopped cake still tasted good, and I had all those other ingredients - especially the fresh raspberries which were hand-picked by virgins at $4 a half-pint. So.
I started over and made another batter. I used up all the granulated sugar in the pantry, of course, and substituted some powdered sugar for the 100 g or so I was short. That seemed fine. This time, I baked three cake layers for the proper time and cooled them properly before attempting to remove them, and all three came out nicely (duh, the way they were supposed to all along).
After cooling, I made the fluffy chocolate whipped cream filling and started building the cake. One layer of cake, a layer of filling, then hand-sliced raspberries.
Repeat this for two more layers (since I had four useable cakes) and put the top on.
Another thing I noticed while baking six cake layers is that our oven is not level. The cakes came out thicker on one side than the other, so after the first three I started rotating the pan in the oven about half way through the baking time. This helped a little, but I still had to arrange the layers carefully to compensate so that the whole stack didn't tilt. You're supposed to refrigerate the cake to make it firmer, so I left it in there overnight. It was early-evening on Sunday by this time and I felt like I had done nothing all day but bake cakes (and wash dishes).
Monday after dinner, I made the frosting. First you do a crumb coat, which is a very thin layer all over the cake, to hold down the crumbly cake bits. I refrigerated that again and then put on the final layer.
Since I also don't have one of those narrow frosting spatulas, I applied this with the spatula from the robot culinare, and it left some striations and isn't quite perfect. But I'm well satisfied with the result.
It tastes amazing.
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