Welcome to Gaia! ::

Anyone? sweatdrop

Angel food cake with a solid chocolate filling. or center, drizzled with fudge, maybe sprinkled with a bit of that crunchy orange stuff that gets stuck in your teeth.

Probably a little late for the birthday now, but I have a few ideas for those who want them for future cakes:

Cherry vanilla: Very easy, you just need your (baked) cake (can be white, yellow or the darkest chocolate you can find, though I used white, which i had baked from a mix into two rounds and trimmed up to be even), two cans of vanilla frosting and one jar of maraschino cherries.

For the filling: One can of vanilla frosting, the jar of cherries (drained, save the juice and a few cherries for decoration). Chop the cherries into small pieces in a food processor, mix in a bowl with the frosting, and a little bit of the reserved juice for color. Whip it well.

Before spreading the filling onto the bottom layer, brush it with a little cherry juice first to dampen it. Then spread the filling on thickly (use it all! and make it even. biggrin ) Let chill in the fridge if it's too warm for fifteen or twenty minutes before putting the top layer on. Squish only lightly to firmly seat the top layer on the filling.

Mix more of the juice with the second can of frosting, whip well, then frost your cake. Decorate with reserved cherries.

A variation on this cake is what I call a "Cherries Jubilee Cake", in which I use a white or dark chocolate cake and mix halved or roughly chopped cherries (fresh or maraschino) in with the cake batter before baking.

If you don't have/can't find maraschino cherries, then cherry jam or preserves works very nicely as well.

I also have a Chocolate Peanut Butter Dream cake, which is really out of this world. All you need is a dark chocolate cake mix (er, now I think about it, I think they are called Devil's Food cake?), a jar of peanut butter (smooth or chunky doesn't matter), 1 can of chocolate frosting, 1 can of cream cheese frosting, and if you really want to make it cool, those peanut butter baking chips. Another optional item is chopped peanuts.

When preparing your cake batter, you have the option of adding peanut butter (a few heaping tablespoons) and/or the peanut butter chips to it, but you don't have to. Bake your cake layers (mine are usually round, but I have on occasion baked square or rectangular cakes). But anyway, have your baked cakes, however prepared, cooled, trimmed up and ready.

Take your cream cheese frosting, and scrape it out into a mixer bowl, add as much peanut butter as you want to taste, and whip the mixture until it's smooth and creamy. That's your filling.

Lay out your bottom layer, use all the filling, place your top layer, and refrigerate it it's too warm to firm it up. Then frost with the chocolate frosting. Frost the top a little thicker than the sides, and then if you want to get fancy, send the peanut butter chips or peanuts through a food processor to a medium chop (you don't want them too chunky, nor do you want them to be dust) and taking handfuls of them press them gently into the sides of the cake until the sides are all covered.

I have also been thinking about this cake, and wondering what it would be like if I used two or three boxes of the dark chocolate brownie mixes to make a multi layered chocolate peanut butter brownie mountain cake, but I haven't gotten that far yet.