Cake Ready in Five!

Baking, is a fun activity, but sometimes it could be very time consuming. There are many times when I'm in the mood to whip up a cake, but I don't have the time to create something delicious because the good stuff usually comes from the long recipes. Well, I found a quick but very scrumptious cake recipe that is simple to make. And along with a few tips I learned from How To Break an Egg, a collection of handy cooking techniques, my cake was baked and ready to eat in almost no time! 

Ingredients
- 6 eggs                               - 8 oz. cream cheese
- 1 cup sugar                        - 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 cup flour                         - 8 oz. cool whip whip-cream                     
- 2 tbsp. cocoa powder          - a few tbsp. apple juice 
- 8 tbsp. unsalted butter        *blue ingredients are for the cream

To make the cake, the first step was to beat the sugar and eggs together in a standing electric mixer, until the dough rose and became fluffy. To speed up the process and not have to wait that long for the batter to rise, I used a tip Alice Medrich suggested. Before combining the eggs with the sugar, I beat the eggs briefly with a fork (184). What this did, was help the eggs incorporate better into the batter, so it quickened the process of the batter mixing and rising. Not only did the tip speed up the process, but as a small bonus, it also helped prevent the cake from collapsing when baking. 

After the batter rose, I sifted in the flour and cocoa powder, and mixed them in with a whisk. Once I had the batter all mixed well, I divided it into three portions and poured the batter out into three springform baking pans. I baked the cake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees fahrenheit.


In the recipe, to make the cake cream, softened butter was needed. But to wait for the butter to warm up to room temperature, takes a while, especially when the butter is frozen. Luckily, I learned an easy baking trick from Liz Manrit, a contributor to the book How to Break an Egg, that eliminated the long wait. Liz suggests to  "heat the sugar first in a microwave for about two minutes, and then proceed to cream them with the butter when needed" (59). With this technique, I was able to use frozen butter, but still have my cream turn out just the way it needed to. 

For the cream, the recipe steps are very simple. First, I mixed the sugar and the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer until they blended into a smooth cream. Once they were mixed together, I simply added in the rest of the ingredients into the bowl one by one. I blended my cream, until it was smooth enough for me to paste with. How long you mix, really depends on how smooth you want your cream to be.

Assembling the cake, was not a difficult task since the layers turned out pretty thin. I took the first cake round, and using a spoon, I poured a few tablespoons of apple juice onto the cake. Infusing the cake with a few tablespoons of juice is optional, but it is a miracle worker to prevent a dry cake. If you are worry about your chocolate cake tasting like apples, then that's and extra worry because, the apple juice is not tasted in the cake. 
 

Once both cake rounds were soaked with apple juice, I divided the cream into thirds and frosted the cake.


This recipe is a must try for anyone who has a sweet tooth for chocolate desserts. And the best part of this recipe is, it only takes a matter of minutes to produce a cake that blow your taste buds away!

What kind of tricks do you use to speed up the process when baking or cooking?

"Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes and Handy Techniques." Fine Cooking: n. pag. Rpt. in How to Break an Egg. Ed. Pam Hoenig. Newtown: The Taunton Press, 2005. N. pag. Print.