Chocolate Panda Cake with White Chocolate Frosting

Before I arrived at college this year I think I had baked 4 cakes in my life, and that's a stretch. The first one I remember was in 9th grade, a recipe for La Galette des Rois for extra credit in my French class. Although it good, I was in 9th grade and it was hardly baked by me any more than my parents.

The second cake I remember was a cake-mix cake. I think my mom made the frosting. I cut it into a fish. At least, I think that was me...

The third cake was my first actual cake-from-scratch! My friend told me to make her a carrot cake, and using a recipe my mom found for me (and the carrots she processed for me in her food processor), I made the carrot cake almost all by myself! My dad kind of helped me take it out of the pans, which didn't really work, and I ended up mushing the cake up as the bottom layer...and I didn't take any pictures.

The fourth cake was actually a cake recipe that I made into cupcakes. A very dense, very chocolatey cake recipe from William Sonoma. The frosting was good, but was too soupy at first until I chilled it overnight. It definitely should have stayed a cake, not cupcakes.

And then I came here, didn't bake another cake until Lucy's strawberry birthday cake with a cakemix base, then made David's cake which was delicious but still not great, and then...wow, I just made a lot more cakes than I ever thought I'd make.

This one I made on Saturday for my friends who have summer birthdays, but namely for my friend Steven (aka "Panda"), who requested that I make him a cake. And I think that this one, out of all the cakes I've made so far, is my favorite. I just wanted to use ingredients I have here since I'm almost done with the year and didn't want to stock up on new supplies that I couldn't store over the summer. I didn't even know if chocolate and white chocolate would go together. But I really enjoyed this cake. The filling is a store-bought mix, but that's the only thing I cheated on! For real!

Panda Cake

Grand Fudge Cake
Recipe from Ghiradelli

3/4 cup Unsweetened Cocoa
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 1/3 cups milk
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Grease and lightly flour two 9-inch round cake pans.

In a medium bowl, combine flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, and set aside. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Reduce speed to low, and add vanilla and eggs one at a time, scraping bowl after each addition. Alternately add flour mixture and milk (starting and ending with the flour mixture), while mixing on low speed. Continue to mix until smooth.


Pour into prepared pans. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a cake tester inserted in the center of cake comes out clean.

Filling
Any white-chocolate mousse. I bought mine from the Tops supermarket. It made 2 cups, but I wish I had more, as I'll explain below.

I added 4 crumpled oreos to the 2 cups of mousse, and chilled it for 2 hours.

White Chocolate Frosting
Recipe adapted from Lisa Yockelson's Chocolate Chocolate
You can find the recipe here


My frosting turned out much too soupy. I added some more confectioners sugar but then chilled it. It makes about 4 cups of frosting, which was definitely enough to cover the outside of the cake and probably could have been in the center as well if you didn't want to make the white chocolate mousse, but I really enjoyed the mousse at the center, it was a nice different texture for the cake.

Assembly

At least 11 oreos, 4 used for mixing into the mousse filling.

Take your bottom layer and cover it in chilled mousse filling. Then place the second layer on top.

My cake layers crowned and I should have leveled at least the bottom layer off, but didn't. I had about 2 cups of filling, which left a lot of space, but luckily I improvised by crumpling up 4 oreos and pressing them into the sides to fill up the cracks:


Cover the rest of the cake with frosting. I decorated it like a panda by taking an oreo apart, making sure all the "white stuff" stayed on one side, and taking a crumb and making that the pupil. I did this twice to make two eyes and two ears, and took another cookie apart to make the nose and mouth, like so:

And again, there was a lot of leftover frosting...

So yeah! Definitely try this cake! It was perfectly moist and there was just enough frosting! The combination was perfect!