There is a recipe in this book I have by James Peterson that makes a chocolate devil's food cake with a whipped cream filling and white chocolate topping. I noticed the white chocolate topping and thought, "I could decorate that somehow!" My idea was to melt the chocolate and pour it on the cake and put a spiral design in it to resemble a galaxy. But I'm getting ahead of myself, first I had to make the cake!
The process of making the cake reminded me a lot of brownies, namely the part where you melt the chocolate together with butter (and sour cream in this recipe!). The sour cream helps keep the cake moist, I think, which is especially helpful for a chocolate cake. This isn't the cake that I decorated, though. You see, the recipe suggested that I only butter and flour the bottom and sides of my spring-form pan. However, most of that seemed to absorb into the cake while it baked, meaning when I tried to turn the cake out of the pan as the recipe called for, the cake broke in half (first time that's happened in 8 years and something like 15-20 different cakes baked). To remedy this, I put together a special improvised mixture of sugar and water to make a syrup as glue. I could now use my pastry brush to apply the syrup to the sundered cake halves and restore them to unity.
Okay, not really, I just made another cake, this time ignoring the pan preparations the recipe suggested and using a buttered piece of parchment paper in the pan:
Anyway, (notice the spelling without an "s", because that's the correct way; sorry, I'll turn the sass off now) the next step is to slice the cake into layers, use that syrup (it's real, right there in that white bowl with the brush on top) to brush each layer, and fill the layers with a stabilized whipped cream. That is basically just whipped cream with a small amount of gelatin added so it won't absorb as easily into the cake (like that flour and butter did...). Once the final layer of cake was in place, the entire cake is sealed with the whipped cream and left to chill for a few hours.
While that happened, I began setting up for decorating the white chocolate topping. I wanted to color it somehow to make a spiral design on it, but I knew melted chocolate could be tricky to work with. If I decided to pour the chocolate on the cake and then add drops of dye to it, I would have to work fast to do a design before the chocolate cooled, I figured. So instead, I tried something I saw in this video for french macarons. Basically the idea was to streak food dye across a sheet of plastic wrap and pour the melted chocolate onto it. Then roll the plastic around the chocolate and place this into a piping bag with a piping tip:
This didn't quite scale up to a cake from french macarons (as the technique was designed for), and it more turned out like this:
Not a spiral, but with some help of a toothpick, I think I got something like a stellar nebula (or whatever pleases the imagination, really). One could even imagine that the chocolate cake represents the dark matter that is ever-present throughout the cosmos. I also added cake crumbs (interstellar dust often found in nebulae?) derived from the first iteration of the chocolate cake along the side. In the end, the presentation was okay and the flavor was delightful. Chocolate and whipped cream make a great combination.
:^)