Bon Voyage Tracey!

My friend Tracey had spent the summer in the DC-Metro area doing an intensive orientation before her 9-month secondment to Malaysia for CAMSA. CAMSA stands for the Coalition to Abolish Modern-day Slavery in Asia. Its mission is to rescue and protect trafficking victims, punish traffickers through economic and legal measures, and pressure the governments of the source and destination countries to enact and enforce anti-trafficking laws and policies.

To bid her a fond farewell, her friends threw a barbecue, and I baked her a cake using the dark chocolate cupcake recipe she is such a fan of. To compensate for the longer baking time that would be needed for baking the batter in cake-form rather than cupcakes, I added an extra egg and it really came out well.

The key to the dark richness of the recipe is 2 forms of chocolate: excellent dark chocolate bars, as well as cocoa powder. I used Belgian dark chocolate and a combination of Hershey's Special Dark cocoa and Colombian cocoa powder from a unique source.... It gets slowly melted together with butter over a double boiler:

I often pair my dark chocolate cupcakes with fresh strawberry buttercream, and this time was no exception. It is a variation of the mousseline buttercream recipe that is often mentioned on cupKatedang.blogspot.com. I use fresh strawberries (although frozen can also work well when they go out of season) and puree them in a food processor. I strain the puree through a sieve and use the juice as the liquid base for the sugar syrup that gets incorporated into my italian meringue for the buttercream. When all is said and done, I put a tablespoon or two of the crushed strawberries into the mousseline buttercream to kick up the strawberry flavor and give it an interesting texture. I filled the chocolate cake layers with this strawberry mousseline buttercream and it looked good enough to eat right then and there!

Next came the hard part for me, how to decorate the cake? Earlier this morning, while picking up ingredients for the cake at the local grocery store, I stopped by the bakery section (I can never resist checking out the "competition"!) I saw some cakes decorated with the cutest roses. Not the traditional, Wilton-type, but more...art-deco-y. They were roundish and reminded me of cartoons or clip art. So I knew I wanted to try making those. I whipped up a new batch of vanilla mousseline buttercream, which I dyed a couple different colors to finish trimming the cake.

Italian meringue base for the mousseline buttercream.

A blank canvas!

And now: the finished project....

Best of luck Tracey!