Chocolate Yogurt Cake

I used to love making layer cakes. You can see this by browsing back to a few years ago on my blog where I have posts of various layer cakes including pistachio, lemon, and chocolate-almond-strawberry. But the truth is I used to make layer cakes for every birthday I celebrated with friends and family, so there were many more as well. That said, I stopped making layer cakes when I moved out of Canada. I just never had the space in Indonesia, and my apartment was too hot. 

Last week was a friend's birthday, and I decided to make her a real birthday cake cake. I know you're thinking, "India's in lockdown." Yes we are.  But since I am quarantined alone and a few of my friends from my building are also quarantined alone, we have adopted each other as a quarantine family, and make the exception of seeing each other. So it was of my quarantine sister's birthday, and I thought, what better a time to make a cake? I was a little nervous to make one after so long, and I knew it wouldn't turn out as well as my cakes used to when I was making them often. But I'm glad I gave it a go, because it was nice to be able to giver her a treat on her birthday even though we can't go out. And boy does it feel good to be making layer cakes again. 

Chocolate Yogurt Cake:

Ingredients:

• 4 1/2 oz dark chocolate, chopped
• 1 c boiling water
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1c softened butter
• 11 1/2 oz sugar
• 3 eggs, separated
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/2 c flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2/3 cup plain yogurt

Directions:

1. Put the chocolate in a heatproof bowl and pour the boiling water over it. Stir in the baking soda and leave aside to cool
2. Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the egg yolks, vanilla, then cooled chocolate mixture
3. Whisk together the flour and baking powder. Fold into the batter alternating with the yogurt
4. Whisk the egg whites in a clean, dry bowl, until stiff peaks form
5. Fold the whipped egg whites gently into the batter
6. Divide the batter between two layer cake pans and bake at 350 degrees F or 170 degrees C for 40-45 minutes, or until the cake springs back to the touch.
7. Let the cake layers cool for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool completely

Chocolate Cream Cheese icing:

• Up to 1 cup butter, softened
• 1 wheel laughing cow cheese, or the equivalent of Philadelphia cream cheese if you can find it
• Less than one bag of icing sugar
• Some milk, added sparingly (will be less than 1/4 cup, I reckon)
• 1-2 tbsp vanilla, to taste

Directions:

1. To make the icing, start by creaming half of the butter and all of the cream cheese together until smooth. Then gradually add icing sugar to it, alternating with small quantities of milk, to achieve and maintain the desired consistency. At some point add the vanilla. Be careful not to add too much milk at any time, because it will dissolve the sugar and you might end up having to make a far larger batch of icing than you planned in order to get it back to the right consistency. The icing should be smooth and easily spreadable, but not liquidy. And provided you have used a good amount of butter, it will firm up a little in the fridge.
2. To ice the cake, wait until both cake layers are totally cool. Then cut each layer in half lengthwise to make four separate cake layers (try to cut evenly so as not to ended up with a lopsided cake - mine was lopsided because I wasn't careful enough in this step).
3. Choose a plate, and cover just the sides with parchment paper - four separate pieces that will be easy to pull away after icing the cake. Spread a layer of icing over this cake layer, and carefully top with the next layer of cake. Repeat this step until all four layers are stacked and layered with icing. Then you can do a crumb coat if you wish (I never do this, but again I probably should.) To do a crumb coat, you just spread a thin layer of icing over the whole cake and set it in the fridge for an hour or so to harden up the icing so that later when you add the final icing onto the cake you don't have to worry about crumbs popping up on the sides and top of your cake.
4. Finally, when you are ready to do the final touches on your cake, you simply ice the top and sides to your liking, and if you wish, you can pipe little icing swirls around the edge with a star nozzle to make it look a little fancier. Since it was a birthday and I wanted it to really feel like a birthday cake, I added colourful sprinkles as well.