Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone! I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season!
I got to enjoy my time with family and friends in New Orleans this year. Each Christmas when I return home, I look forward to decorating pseudo-gingerbread houses and sugar cookies with my family, along with creating some other type of dessert for us all to enjoy after Christmas dinner.
This year, my family and I decided that I would make a white chocolate and peppermint cake, similar to the cake I made a few years ago for my work Christmas party.
My first plan for making the cake this year was to bake my tried and true vanilla cake recipe with peppermint extract mixed into the batter, and to then fill the cake layers with white chocolate and peppermint mousse. However, when I arrived in New Orleans last week, I discovered that my family found a white chocolate and peppermint cake and frosting recipe, and had all of the ingredients already. Great! I love trying new recipes because sometimes, they turn out AMAZING! (Churro bars, anyone?)
Sometimes, new recipes do not turn out to be great though… Such is the case this Christmas.
Blue Christmas, indeed.
It wasn’t all bad though! Let’s focus on the positive for a moment, shall we? For one thing, the white chocolate and peppermint buttercream is FANTASTIC! Trust me, my nieces licked the beaters and told me so. (My mother also licked the bowl and agreed with their assessment.)
Also this cake gave me an opportunity to take a stab at a cake batter technique that I’ve wanted to try out for a long time: cake stripes.
It could have been a super cool effect when cutting into the cake, but unfortunately, this batter was very fluid and took forever to bake, which means that the batter had plenty of time to mix together with ease, so the technique did not work as I would have hoped.
It came out like a completely dyed cake as opposed to the stripes I had envisioned for this cake. But the bright side of it is that when I told my mother of my plans for trying out this stripes technique, she decided to give me one of my Christmas presents early to help me out with this cake - an entire set of powdered gel food coloring!
I can’t wait to take more of these babies for a test drive!
Lastly, this cake somehow came out with the texture of a cake ball, and I’m sure you all remember exactly how I feel about those.
I shared these failures with two of my uncles during separate “Christmas greetings” phone calls, and one of them told me to blame it entirely on the humidity levels of New Orleans. While that is SO tempting to do, I actually think it has more to do with the melted chocolate folded into the batter than anything. (Also, my other uncle told me that he both reads my blog AND shares it with his colleagues so even if I failed on this one cake, there is now a small group of people in Tennessee who unquestionably understand the difference between a macaron and a macaroon, and honestly, I could die happy knowing that!)
Maybe next year I’ll try this cake again but with my own recipes to give my family the show stopping (and tastebud pleasing) dessert that they deserve!
I hope your Christmas desserts were far more successful than mine were, and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday season!
Happy eating, y’all!
If you tried this dessert, or any other desserts in my blog, please share my Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram posts about them and let people know what you think! Mahalo!
#peppermint #whitechocolate # CakeDecorating #HappyHolidays #TraditionalDesserts #TheSugarArt #powderedgel #MadeWithLove #cakedesign #Dessert #holidaybaking #HolidaySeason #SFPastryChef #RebelChef #SouthernBaking #LadyChef #RebellionBaking