Chocolate Birthday Cake

As a follow up to yesterday's post about Pat's Birthday, I thought the cake tasted pretty darn good and I would use this recipe again. Next time I might try this with cupcakes instead though. We dug into it too quickly to get a good photo, so this is all I could come up with.








I used Ina Garten's chocolate cake recipe and followed it pretty closely. With recipes outside of baking I like to deviate quite a bit, but with baking I find it much more important to stick with the original recipe. As I mentioned yesterday, I had a little trouble getting the cakes out of the pans because I did not use the parchment paper. I attempted, but lining the round pans with the parchment paper takes a lot more patience than I have. Any tips are welcome! The only addition I had to the actual cake were the chocolate chips on top, and I added those because Pat said his favorite cake as a kid was chocolate, with chocolate frosting and chocolate chips on top.

I did change the frosting a little as I was nervous it might come out a little too coffee flavored, and Pat's not the biggest coffee fan. To avoid this, I increased the chocolate from 6 to 8 oz and decreased the instant coffee to 1 tablespoon, along with 1 teaspoon of hot water. Those small changes worked well and rather than the coffee flavor over powering, it enhanced the chocolate flavor.