My blogging has been stagnant for a while now and its taken some pushing to get this place back up and running. I always have a big bucket list of excuses ready, but let me just be honest. I don’t know why I needed a break. I am not going through my lazy phase cycle, I am energetic and happy. My laptop’s been acting weird, but yet not enough to keep me away from blogging if I am really keen.

Sometimes, I have learnt, you just have to let things go. Not everything happens your way and if that means no blogging for a long time, let that be it. Good thing about that is you are spared an analysis and a big lecture that would have gone on forever! Know that I am fine, know that I am doing well and know that I don’t blog regularly :-).

Now that I am here, lets talk a bit about the cake. This week’s BM theme is checkerboard and let’s start with the classic checkerboard cake. I have done made this pattern cookies multiple times, but never the cake. So when opportunity arrived in the form of my brother in law’s birthday, the cake had to be checkerboard. The inside patterns are not as sharp as I would like them to be, but I was just happy with the success of the cake than to concentrate on the negatives. You can fine the mousse frosting recipe here and the glaze recipe here respectively. Read on for the procedure to get the pattern.

Pictorial

Bake one 6″ vanilla cake and one 6″ chocolate cake. Here I made the same vanilla cake batter, divided into two equal portions and added some cocoa powder for the chocolate cake. Time saver!! When the cakes have cooled down completely, slice off the dome (if any) and cut each cake into two layers. Using a 4″ round cookie cutter(or a sharp lid) cut off circles from middle of all four layers.

Using a smaller two inch round cutter, cut smaller circles from middle of all the 4″ cake pieces. Now, put the circles back into the 6″ cake, but alternating the colors.

When its time to assemble the cake, anchor a vanilla cake on the cake board with some frosting. Spread the filling of your choice on top (chocolate mousse here) and top with the chocolate cake. Repeat the process for the other layers, keeping in mind to alternate the colors. (Vanilla ->Chocolate->Vanilla->Chocolate). Frost the cake completely and decorate as you wish. I used a glaze and a lot of chocolate on top. 

When you cut the cake, you will see the checkerboard pattern. To get sharper and smoother slices, refrigerate the cake before cutting.Since the cake was tall, I added a thick straw in the middle. This gives some support to the cake to prevent it from sliding and falling down.

One thing I did wrong was to top the cake with all the chocolate pieces before the glaze was set. I should have refrigerated the cake till the glaze wasn’t runny anymore before loading it with all that you see there. 

Check out the Blogging Marathon page for the other Blogging Marathoners doing BM#66