Thanks to Nicole over at Sweet Tooth (who has the recipe on her blog) for picking today's Sweet Melissa Sunday's recipe....Chocolate Malted Layer Cake. And considering I was nibbling on the chocolate malted balls I picked up at the store while walking home and carrying several heavy grocery bags, there was the promise of many yummy things to come. My only hesitancy was in the strong coffee called for in the cake since I don't much care for coffee and trying to melt chocolate in my temporary rigged double boilers since that can periodically give me give me the culinary fits when it doesn't work. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the coffee once it was in the recipe...I couldn't taste it at all. The double boiler was still a bit of a pain but it turned out okay.
I knew from the get go that I was going to have to make modifications to this. Having a double layer cake in the house is dangerous for me since I can rationalize a slice of cake as just a bite if I can find a way to balance it on a fork. So, I chose to go with using a mini bundt cake pan for waistline damage control.
My biggest mistake was forgetting that I was melting unsweetened chocolate for the cake when I decided to lick the spoon. But after everything came together I had one tiny (okay, 2 or 3 tastes...just to make sure it was still okay you know) and thought, wow. It was a deep, rich chocolate that just made you want to close your eyes and forget about all your woes. With that kind of chocolate, a little goes a very long way. I was slightly worried about how thin the batter was, even though Melissa said that it was going to be like that, as I've had some past woes with forgetting to put ingredients in recipes and starting going through this recipe again just to make sure.
In the end I had difficulty getting the cake out of the bundt pan so I'd be hesitant to try this kind of cake in a pan like that again. I was able to salvage a couple in fairly decent shape, but they're a bit rough around the edges. I'd liked the taste and would be open to trying this again but maybe in a square mini cake pan to see if that would help. I did like the taste of them but this reminded me a lot more of a brownie than a cake...same fudgy texture and taste. Which hey, works well for me too. I tried a glaze at first but didn't like how it looked very much so in the end, I went with simplicity by combining powdered sugar with the malt sugar and just lightly sprinkling the cakes with that before topping them with malted milk balls.
I did like the cake overall. Maybe it's just the fact that my chocolate tooth has mellowed over the years, but for me the frosting would have made this too chocolately (I know, a few years earlier I would have scoffed at the idea). I'm not sure that I would make this again unless I had guests to eat it, but if I did, I think I would go with a raspberry glaze to offset all the sweetness with a bit of tartness.
