The New Chef's Journal

I was recently searching for dessert to make my girlfriend for our second anniversary and stumbled across the website eatingwell.com. This site has a lot of good recipes. Their slogan is "where good taste meets good health," but I can't really say that this recipe is healthy in any way. It's a very rich, mousse-like chocolate cake. Mine turned out slightly overcooked. It was still rich and delicious, but probably should have been a bit softer and gooier. The recipe says to bake it for 20-25 minutes and my oven managed to overcook it in 17. I hate my oven. A lot. I picked this recipe for two reasons. The first is that it looked delicious. The second its that it had a very unusual cooking method that I'd never tried before. Rather than simply placing the cake pan in the oven, the cake pan is placed in a larger baking pan partially filled with boiling water and then baked. This method worked out pretty well for me, but it is kind of a death trap. Transporting boil...

I really didn't intend for this to be a dessert blog, but this is the third consecutive dessert entry I've done. This weeks entry is a birthday cake that I made for my girlfriend. She requested a very chocolately cake and this one definitely meets that standard. This cake is based loosely on a recipe by Sara Campbell on foodnetwork.com . Her recipe looks incredible, but it makes a giant cake and there seem to be some issues with the directions for the buttercream. My version combines separate recipes for the cake, the buttercream frosting and the dark chocolate ganache glaze. The chocolate cake is from a recipe by  Cathy Lowe on foodnetwork.com. The buttercream frosting is based on a recipe from Wilton.com. The dark chocolate ganache is based on a recipe from  allrecipes.com Ingredients: For the cake: 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour 2 cups sugar 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1 cup milk...