I am Petra Cox with Mom's Apple Pie Company in Occoquan, Virginia and today we made delicious, rich, fudgy, dark chocolate cake and these cake layers I made ahead of time and they have spent an hour in the oven before being ready and they have fully cooled off to room temperature. So, with my springform pan, all I really have to do is release the side and pull it off and then take the cake off the bottom.
So, that's really simple with the springform pan and I have the metal to take off the bottom and that layer parchment peels off, piece of cake, and you can just lay that gently on to whatever work surface you need to do. I have two layers here and you will notice that the tops, they were sort of the taller around the sides, they have risen a little more, a lot around the sides and you just need to trim that off if you want a perfectly even top of your cake.
So, what you need to do is, you take a knife and you just keep at level as you work slowly through the cake. So, it looks a little rough to the eye, but now you have a somewhat more even cake and you can use the nice flat bottom to ice on top and keep this crummy part more towards the bottom because the danger of keeping those crumbs is that, they will mix in with the icing and you don't get as nice looking icing top for the finish. So, I am going to flip this over and then we have a nice flat surface to work with.
I am going to put a little bit of the chocolate butter cream on there and in the middle, it is okay if the crumb is mixing, it doesn't really have much of an affect on the appearance, but you don't need to put too much in the middle, but do notice that you can put it in the middle and when you put the other layer on top, it tends to spread out a bit.
So, I gently put the other layer on top and this point I am going to sort of dust some of my crumbs away so that they don't get stuck to the icing and spatula tends to collect some of the crumbs. So it is important just to -- on the edge of your bowl just to release some of the icing that has been on your spatula, so you are not adding more crumbs to the icing. And as much as you can, try not to touch the cake so much, try to use just your tools to touch the icing and spread over, lightly over the cake. This is a spatula made especially for icing the cake and it can have either a more sort of rustic wavy look to the cake or you can do it completely smooth.
Personally, I like the Mom's Chocolate Cake, rustic wavy look, but you can notice that I am spreading icing from the middle, out to the edges and I have got a little crumb on there, I am going to just put that on the side. I am going to add a little more. And again we have the bottom of the cake on top so that we have a nice, smooth surface to work with and then we are going to the sides which are little trickier.
When you are working with the sides, there is really much higher risk of collecting crumbs on your tools, but it is okay to pick out little crumbs, but if you don't mind the crumbs, it's okay to leave them there, they taste good. What I am using as my working surface is a sheet of the parchment paper or baking tray liner and you can just use a blade and cut around the edge when you are finished and scoop that over onto more of a nice display plate or platter, a cake platter and just remember when you are cutting it that there is paper on the bottom.
And there we have a cute little wavy homemade chocolate cake. You can decorate it however you like, but this is in homemade style and you can dig in, it's a delicious rich chocolate cake and the best way to cut it, is probably with a hot wet knife so you can cut through it without dragging the crumbs through it, but that is how we make our chocolate cake at Mom's Apple Pie Company and you can do it at home now.