the cake slice: Cappucino Chiffon Layer Cake

One fun thing about the bloging community is that you always have people who come up with fab new ideas. One of my fave bloggers, Gigi from GigiCakes paired up with one of her best blogging pals and created a new monthly blogging event called The Cake Slice.

I'm a Cupcake Maven, and I make a mean cupcake swirl, but I am a horrible cake maker. Actually let's rephrase that. My cakes taste darn good, but I am not so good at the cake assembling/frosting/decorating part, so I don't think they look very good. But it's also well known I am a crazy perfectionist, so who knows how skewed my reality is.

The purpose of The Cake Slice is to work on layer cakes. And since I love eating them, but need more practice making them, I was excited to join. We bake solely from one book, Sky High: Irresistable Triple-Layer Cakes, which is another good thing, because sometimes too much choice is NOT positive. I actually admit to needing some sort of structure when it comes to my baking. Left to my own devices and thinking about baking a layer cake, I will get easily distracted while researching online, and end up in the kitchen making brownies or cookies, and ... no layer cake.



So anyway, The Cake Slice. Our first cake was called Cappucino Chiffon Layer Cake and it combines all sorts of fun things like multiple steps, soaking the layers, liquor and whipped cream frosting...the latter of which many times for me is iffy at best. I have never frosted a cake with whipped cream frosting nor made a chiffon cake before.



Now I have. And I learned that little bit more from this experience so I am that much better of a baker and decorator now. I have a hard time getting sides straight when frosting, but the whipped cream was surprisingly easy to work with. I am really excited about this new event and cant wait to see what it brings us. This book has a lot of amazing sounding cakes..and I like unusual stuff, so onwards we go.



This recipe called for an espresso flavored chiffon layer cake, soaked with an espresso liquor mixture, then layered and coated in vanilla whipped cream. My only variations were using Vanilla Kahlua instead of Rum for my liquor; and in the whipped cream topping I put a little of regular Kahlua and 2 tsp of unsweetened Scharffen Berger cocoa for a little extra flavor.



It was fun to see everyone's variations on the cakes, and to see how the cut-up inside shot looked so similar on our cakes. So fun. Be sure to check out the other event bakers Cappucino Chiffon Layer Cakes over at the Cake Slice, enjoy!! Interested in the book? Amazon has it for a pretty good deal...buy it!