Earlier this month my coolio friend Adam had a birthday party.  It was all grilling, blue skies, light breezes and good times.  Oh, and did I mention delicious but incredibly ugly cakes?

Last year I made him a pretty similar chocolate-peanut butter cake, but this time I found a different recipe I wanted to try.  Smitten Kitchen has a fabulous-looking recipe for this type of cake from which I took the peanut butter frosting recipe.  Unfortunately – as much as I love Smitten Kitchen – something clearly went awry.

See, in the Smitten Kitchen pictures the frosting looks smooth and…well, very frosting-like.  Cream cheese, 1 stick of butter, peanut butter and 5 cups of confectioner’s sugar was supposed to yield this creamy and spreadable frosting to go both between the layers and over the top of the cake.  Somewhere along the line I screwed up.

As you can sort of see from the picture, my frosting turned out way too thick and solid; in fact it wasn’t even remotely spreadable.  Eventually my tactic became “smoosh it around with the spatula until it covers enough of the cake to add the next layer.”  It was basically solid, more suited for eating with your fingers than spreading around a cake.  I was surprised – I didn’t even add all 5 cups of sugar; in the end it was only around 3-4.  The only corner I cut was to use a single 8 oz package of cream cheese instead of the recommended 10 oz…could the missing 2 oz really have made so much of a difference in consistency?

But at any rate it was too late to start over (plus I was almost out of ingredients) so I sucked it up and decided to pass it off as intentional.  Or just fess up and point out all its flaws, as I typically do.

So on I trudged!  I thought that perhaps the top-most ganache-style layer would smooth out the roughness of the cake as a whole.  I was right!

Well…maybe not at first.  Delicious-looking, yes?

That’s more like it!

Luckily, while the cake was hideous it was also delicious.  Peanut butter and chocolate are still an excellent combination.

Since I was already late for the party I dropped the cake onto a plate and balanced it precariously on a book in the front seat of my car (sans-book the cake would have slid directly into the back of the seat, covering it dog hair).  Of course, if I’d been smart I would’ve just pulled a cake box from the back of my cupboard and not had to worry about anything.  But noooo.  I was in a hurry, so my brain was dutifully skipping steps in logic.

My book strategy only sort-of worked.  While it did keep the cake from sliding into my dog-hair-covered car seat, it didn’t mitigate any forward-sliding.  Have you ever tried to grasp a cake with your hand to keep it from slipping onto the floor of your car?  I have.  It leaves a nice hand-print in your carefully crafted icing.  Just so you know.

But despite the ugliness of the cake and my attempts to save it from destruction with my bare hands, the dessert made it in one piece to the party where it was devoured with happiness by almost everyone there.  All in all, a pleasant experience!

I think I’ll definitely be trying this cake again sometime, but only after I try to figure out what in the world I did to screw up that peanut butter frosting.  If you decide to give it a whirl, let me know how it goes!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Ugly Cake

Makes 1 2-layer 8″ cake.  Very rich, recommend small pieces!

Cake:

Use my tried’n’true chocolate cake recipe from Sweetapolita in 2x 8″ pans.

Peanut Butter Frosting + Ganache:

Use Smitten Kitchen‘s recipes!

Construction:

• Slice each 8″ cake into 2 layers
• Layer the PB frosting between each layer
• Drizzle/spread the ganache over top
• CONSUME!