• Hi there, my name is Heidi Swanson. 101 Cookbooks is my recipe journal. It's where I write about the recipes that intersect my life, travels, and everyday interests. Often the recipes are from my cookbook collection, sometimes not - they might come from a friend, or I might write about a recipe I created myself.
  
  I focus primarily on natural, whole foods and ingredients - vegetarian recipes that are good for you and for the planet. Welcome!

My friend Jen is having a birthday celebration tomorrow night. She is my pal, and also my TKD partner - it's up to me to bring an awesome cake.

I dug through all my clipped recipes, and came across this one. It was the cover recipe from the December issue of Bon Appetit, a year and a half ago. The cake looks rich, and dense, and extra-chocolatey. I don't think the peppermint flavoring is going to fly this time of year, so wherever it calls for peppermint, I am going to swap in espresso......in effect it will be a triple chocolate cake with chocolate espresso filling. Yum.

Flash forward an hour or two, or three - mission accomplished. I can't believe I didn't take a picture of this cake when it was finished. It turned out absolutely beautifully. I intended on taking a few shots of it to post, but I couldn't find the batteries for the camera, and was in a hurry to get out the door last night. The cake isn't very tall, but it is heavy - or maybe a better word is dense. In a good way. Not as dense as a truffle, but somewhere between the consistency of a box cake and a truffle. I poured a thick coating of the chocolate glaze frosting over it which hardens up quite a bit in the fridge, and created a smooth, beautiful coating on the cake-like a real chef made it. I ended up sprinkling little petals of purple, pink, magenta, and off-white edible flowers on top and it gave the cake a really pretty, natural, springtime look to it. Those colors seemed to look particularly nice with the deep chocolate brown of the cake.

The cake tasted fantastic, I would even go heavier on the espresso next time, and then brush the cake layers with a generous dose of kahlua or something, to put it all completely over the top. This is the perfect dinner party cake, it easily served 12. A small piece goes a very long way.

To feature an actual recipe taken from a cookbook, it is best to request permission from the publisher or author. In the early days on 101 Cookbooks, I would tell people where to find the recipe, but not feature the recipe itself. Eventually I began to request permission to run the actual recipes, but this wasn't one of them. The majority of entries on 101 Cookbooks will have the recipes attached, this just happens to be one of the ones that doesn't. My apologies!

From: Bon Appetit: December 2001

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