Devil's Food Cake

Been making a lot of Devil's Food Cake lately. For some reasons when I posted my new design for the cake in my www.facebook.com/dwenujang and www.facebook.com/PrettyYummyThings a lot of my customers started to order this cake again. And of course some of them asked me to change the design a little to suit some special occasions.

 This was my first design of my Devil's Food Cake. The Fluffy white Meringue frosting was too soft for the cake and cannot stand the hot n humid weather in Kuala Lumpur. However not many people ordered this cake maybe because it looks rather plain.

 This is my new improved design of Devil's Food Cake. I used Vanilla Swiss Meringue Buttercream and then topped with Chocolate Ganache and Chocolate nuggets. The Swiss Meringue Buttercream and the Chocolate ganache set well on the cake and can stand long hours without refrigeration and most suitable to the scorching hot and humid weather of Malaysia.

 This is my latest design of my Devil's Food Cake. I was requested by a customer to change the design to be more colorful and children appropriate. So I changed the Chocolate Nuggets with colorful chocolate coated peanuts for the top of the cake because it has odd shapes and can stand up well and provide a good dimension to the cake design. On the side I used colorful sugar coated chocolate candies from Nestle Smarties, similar to M&M but I don't like M&M because it has those printed letters on each candy.

So Small by Carrie Underwood

Sometimes life is so hard to deal with and just when you thought that you are okay, another tragedy happens. It's a never ending story of war and you have to fight for your life. At some point you just feel like giving up to just lie down and die. But you just don't have that much courage to die either, so you end up stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.

I find this song from Carrie Underwood is so moving and so true of the life we live in.

What you got if you ain't got love?The kind that you just wanna give awayIt's okay to open upGo ahead and let the light shine through
I know it's hard on a rainy dayYou wanna shut the world outAnd just be left aloneBut don't run out on your faith
'Cause sometimes that mountain you've been climbingIs just a grain of sandAnd what you've been out there searching for foreverIs in your hands
And when you figure outLove is all that matters after allIt sure makes everything elseSeem so small
It's so easy to get lost insideA problem that seems so big at the timeIt's like a river that's so wideIt swallows you whole
While you're sitting around thinking 'bout what you can't changeAnd worrying about all the wrong thingsTime's flying by, moving so fastYou better make it count 'cause you can't get it back
Sometimes that mountain you've been climbingIs just a grain of sandAnd what you've been out there searching for foreverIs in your hands
Oh, and when you figure outLove is all that matters after allIt sure makes everything elseSeem so small
Sometimes that mountain you've been climbingIs just a grain of sandAnd what you've been out there searching for foreverIs in your hands
And then you figure outLove is all that matters after allIt sure makes everything elseSeem so small

Pillsbury's Lemon Delight Pound Cake

My friend Kamizi always love a good Lemon Pound Cake. For some reason he doesn't like any chocolate cake or any dark chocolate frosting at all. So recently for his office colleagues birthday celebrations, he ordered a Lemon Pound Cake in square shape and ask me to decorate nicely because he wants to show off my cake to his boss.

But there's some little factor I didn't tell him though, I have never made a really good Lemon Pound cake before this. Somehow I have several recipes of this cake but I have never tried them before. So I picked one recipe and made two portions of it so that I can sell one to him and the other one was for me to eat.

The recipe I used was from my Pillsbury, The Complete Book Of Baking that I got when I used to live in Honolulu many years ago (in the late 90's). I picked this recipe because it didn't use Butter but the recipe required me to use Vegetable Oil instead. And to be exact the recipe is called Lemon Delight Pound Cake. However, the recipe also use 3/4 cup of Orange Juice instead of lemon juice, and this made me wondering why though. Maybe because lemon juice is too sour compared to a freshly squeeze orange juice. But why call it Lemon Delight Pound Cake then? Why not call it Citrusy Pound Cake or something? Hmmmm!

So, I baked the cake and gave it to him and they ate it. Their comment was why wasn't it taste so lemony? In addition to their question was why the texture was not soft or moist although the recipe use oil instead of butter? However, now I have found a much better Lemon Pound Cake that use Butter and real lemon juice. And I've baked that recipe last week and the cake was moist, soft and very lemony. So I will NOT use the Pillsbury recipe anymore. Adios!

Below are the photos of my Lemon Delight Pound Cake from the Pillsbury recipe. The square one was bought by Kamizi and the round one was mine. And my final design for my Lemon Pound Cake will look something like this next time (The round cake one, lemon yellow and light turquoise color but I might change the light turquoise to a lime green color.)

For Kamizi's Colleagues Birthday:

My final design for my Lemon Pound Cake.