Recently, I was asked to make 5 lovely, chocolate wedding cakes for the wedding reception of Tessa and her true love Jared. Tessa is the beautiful, artistic and stylish daughter of Jill -my best friend from 4th grade-who is also beautiful, artistic and stylish – go figure!

I was honored to be asked and came up with a variation of my family’s favorite chocolate cake recipe -the one that we use most often for birthdays. I added cocoa to a basic brown sugar-sour cream cake that traditionally uses only unsweetened chocolate. The cocoa revs up the chocolate flavor without changing the texture too much. This cake ages well and is actually better on the 2nd or 3rd day after baking it.

The cakes were frosted with a chocolate fudge frosting and then three of them were coated in a nice shiny, rich, dark chocolate ganache. I hand molded Ranunculus and leaves out of modeling chocolate (made from semisweet chocolate and glucose) for the top of one cake. I was going for an “anthropologie” look with the pleats, stripes and floral geometrics.

The room at the wedding reception was filled with the heady aroma of chocolate… great vigilance was needed to make sure little (and big) fingers stayed out of the frosting until it was time to be served.

My sweet sister, Tonya, flew in from far away parts to help me bake, frost and to give oodles of support- it was a pleasure and a joy to be with her  baking cakes of love. So -many thanks T!

recipe below:

gabifavfudgecake3.txt

gabchoc-fudge-frost.txt

choc-ganache.txt