Someone on Instagram posted this cake recently and since my husband loves chocolate cake (especially ones with ganache icing), I knew I had to add it to my “to bake” list. I wasn’t able to find Scharffen Berger cocoa or unsweetened chocolate in our grocery stores so I had to purchase it online.

The cake itself is pretty easy to make. You combine all of the dry ingredients and then add the wet ingredients to it. My stand mixer can be pretty messy sometimes so I actually found it easier to pour the boiling water in and then mix the final bit by hand to avoid it splashing all over the place. Mine cooked for exactly 30 minutes and then when it came time to turn the layers out I ran a knife around the edge and it came out perfectly. As long as you’re putting parchment paper in the bottom and spraying/buttering your pans well you shouldn’t have any issues with it sticking.

While ganache isn’t my favorite frosting, it is really easy to make. I don’t have a decent double boiler so I heated my cream/sugar in the microwave and then put in the chopped chocolate and butter. The instructions were a little confusing because it appears you begin frosting right away but I felt like it was still a little too runny and would’ve gotten all over the place. After consulting my husband we decided to whip the ganache so we put it in the fridge for about 15 minutes with the intentions of whipping it. In what I can only describe as the weirdest hand mixing whisk incident of all time, the whipping didn’t quite work out and since I had to throw out one of the whisk attachments I tried whipping as best I could. It never got to the stage it should have been at so I finally gave up and after cleaning up ganache from the aforementioned whisk incident, I just decided to frost the cake. It wasn’t as whippy (yes, I’m making up words here…) as I had hoped but it was a little firmer making it easier to frost.

This is a really really rich cake, which is the main reason I don’t like ganache frosting. Despite this, it was very good; though I think you could probably drop the sugars a little without it being a huge deal since it’s a pretty sweet cake. The Scharffen Berger chocolate has a bit of an earthy taste to it which added some complexity. While I don’t usually use the word “earthy” to describe a dessert, I don’t mean it in a bad way here. I’m giving it a 9 in terms of taste but that’s because it’s just a little too sugary and rich in my opinion. This isn’t a difficult recipe and I’d certainly make it again!

Recipe Used: Scharffen Berger