Recipes

My middle sister decided to celebrate her birthday in a big way this year--it had been years since she had had a birthday party, and I guess she decided it was time for another one--so she, being a HUGE Tolkien fan, decreed that she was having a Hobbit Feast and inviting everyone she could think of. Of course, a "feast" means that there will be a TON of food, and to minimize the effort involved, she asked all those attending to bring a dish (or two) potluck style to the party, and she would cook the main entree and some sides of her own. My contribution was a chocolate cake and rolls.

In my family, I am known for my chocolate cake; it's moist and delicious, not too sweet or overwhelming in its chocolatyness (is that a word?), but just all around the best chocolate cake you will ever eat. Not that it's a secret recipe or anything; it's simply the recipe for Perfect Chocolate Cake on the back of every container of Hershey's Cocoa Powder. It's pretty much the only cake I do not make from a box mix, it's so good. I guess most people just don't pay attention to it, because nobody I know even knew about the recipe before I told them of it.

Several years ago--before my kids were born--I took the Wilton Cake Decorating Classes offered at our local Hobby Lobby and learned how to do all that fancy stuff you see people do on TV. About the only time I ever put any of it to use is to make birthday cakes for the people I love, so it was a no-brainer to surprise Jennifer with, not just the plain chocolate cake she was expecting, but a themed cake for her party. So I searched around on Pinterest and found several different designs I liked and then combined the elements I felt most doable for my skill level to create the cake you see at the top. And now I'm gonna walk you through how I did it, complete with my mistakes for you to avoid, in case you'd like to try your own version.

Of course, the first thing I did was to bake my cakes. This cake actually required two recipes worth of chocolate cake; I did three 8" layers and two 6" layers. I knew I would need to cut the two 6" layers to form the front of the house, so I wrapped them separately in plastic wrap and then aluminum foil and stuck them in the freezer overnight. Freezing the cake prevents it from crumbling to pieces when you're cutting it in shapes, but since this is not something I normally do, I did have a few problems with the end cake. But more on that later. 😉

Next I took the three 8" layers and stacked and iced them with a plain base coat. The Hershey's chocolate cake recipe, as I've said, is very moist, and I've found over the years that the best way to prevent the crumbs from showing through the outer decorations is to first put the crumb coat on. I cannot emphasize the importance of this enough! Once the crumb coat sets, any more icing or decorations you put on top will look very pretty with no cake showing through. I used a plain buttercream icing which is my preferred choice when decorating cakes. If you don't know how to make your own, the recipe is very simple: 1 c. butter or margarine, softened
                                                                    3-4 c. powdered sugar (I usually just eyeball it)
                                                                    1 tsp. vanilla
                                                                    just enough milk to keep it from getting too thick to work

This recipe makes enough icing to frost a 2-layer cake; since I was doing a 5-layer cake (roughly), I doubled it. To check the consistency of your icing, remove the bowl from the mixer and stick your spatula in it straight up. If it immediately starts to tip over, the icing is too thin and nothing you make with it will hold its shape. If it doesn't move at all, the icing is too thick and you won't be able to pipe your decorations. You want the spatula to sag just a little bit to one side but not fall over completely--that's the proper consistency for icing a cake and making most decorations.

The next morning I took the top two layers out of the freezer, cut about 2-2 1/2" inches off of one side, and then stacked and iced them with their own crumb coat on top of my bottom layers. Here is what the finished step looked like:

And now for the first of my blonde moments. For some reason (I think I was thinking about the natural slope of a hill leading up to the "house"), I did not level the cake as I was stacking it, something you should always, always do with a cake like this. Since the top tier was essentially on only one half of the bottom tier of the cake, it put enormous stress on the bottom tier and that whole side of the cake gradually began to break away from the other half. I didn't notice this until the next morning, though. 😒(I finished the cake the day before the party.)

I also, for some dumb reason, decided that toothpicks stuck through the layers would be enough to hold it all together--it was not! (Honestly, you'd think I'd never taken a single class--all these rookie mistakes!) The next morning, before the party, found me and Jimmy frantically sticking dowels and straws through the cake and decorations from all angles in an attempt to hold it all together until that evening. But back to the decorations.

Once the crumb coat had dried on the top Friday morning, I took the rest of the icing I had made the day before, separated it into the amounts I would need for each color and tinted each portion. I spread the green icing first and didn't really worry about trying to make it smooth, since I wanted it to kinda look like grass or the ground. I tinted my light brown and iced the front of the Hobbit house, then pulled out a small portion to use for piping later and added more black to the remainder to darken it for the door, windows and footpath.

Then it was time to start adding the candies--yay! I love using candy on cakes to really create a world in miniature! I was lucky that it's so close to Halloween; how could I possibly resist giving Bilbo a pumpkin patch in his front yard with those cute little candy corn pumpkins? They are absolutely my favorite part of this cake! I also took about 7 Tootsie Rolls, warmed them for about 10 seconds in the microwave, and then rolled four flat to make the paving stones for the footpath. I had 3 Tootsie rolls left, so I stacked them to the other side of the door to make some firewood for Bilbo. Then, I took a cinnamon candy stick, broke off the end, stuck it in the top of the cake for a chimney, and then iced over it to make it match everything else (it was bright red).

Finally, I piped in flowers, grass, vines and rocks until I'd used up most of the rest of the icing, but I still had quite a bit of pink and brown left, plus the piece I'd cut off of the top cake, so I combined them together to make a little cake for my family just for fun. 😉

And there you have it, my sister's birthday cake, in all of its glory!

Now, back to those problems I mentioned earlier. As I've already said, I don't normally have to freeze cakes, so I didn't really think about how that would affect the moisture levels of my cake. Also, the day I assembled and decorated the cake was a perfectly beautiful day outside--somewhere around 80 degrees, which is cool for Alabama right now since we're usually in the 90s or 100s--so I had opened all the windows in the house to enjoy the cooler weather and let the house air a bit. You see where this is going, right? Saturday morning I woke up to find that my sister's beautiful cake was literally falling apart from its weight and humidity! Commence 20 minutes of frantically re-shoring the foundations with my husband's help! Whew! Crisis averted...or so I thought. I didn't factor in the 40 minute drive to my sister's house that evening in the back of a hot vehicle (it was too big to sit up front under the air conditioning) over sometimes bumpy roads (the highway was smooth, but that was about it). When we got to my sister's house, it had almost completely fallen apart. I say "almost" because the top was hanging on by a thread...or perhaps by a toothpick 😆! There was nothing to do but just remove the top completely before it pulled the bottom in half and completely destroyed the cake.

Fortunately, I did have the pictures to show Jennifer what it looked like before it fell apart, and she loved it! It didn't matter that the cake was falling apart, she was still so surprised and delighted with the fact that it was a Hobbit cake! And everyone said it was a delicious cake, so it all ended well, I guess. I do want to stipulate, lest you think this kind of thing happens to me all the time or that I'm just that thoughtless when it comes to things I make, that this is the first time this has ever happened to a cake that I've made. Usually, they turn out looking great! This time, however, not so much. What can I say? I guess everyone has their off days.

Oh, and if you don't feel like hunting up a canister of Hershey's Cocoa Powder to make your own homemade chocolate cake, here's the recipe below:



I hope you enjoy it as much as we always do! 😋