Cookies and Candids

This is a week of birthdays (for me, this means that it is a week of non-stop baking!). So, in the next few days, you can look forward to many new recipes and photographs as I get around to posting them. We started celebrating early, and ate incredibly decadent Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake on Monday to celebrate three of our birthdays together. My dear friend Zoe put in the flavor request, and she certainly got what she ordered! A three-layer fluffy dark chocolate cake, with creamy peanut butter cream cheese frosting and filling, and sinfully dark peanut butter-chocolate ganache poured over the top. While it is all of my favorites (peanut butter, chocolate, and cream cheese frosting) rolled into one, I still thought the cream cheese-peanut butter combination would be a little weird…But then I thought about it, and realized how silly that was. Obviously it was good. The sweet and salty tastes combined were out of this world! We sat around eating the frosting by itself for awhile, before realizing that we should save some to eat on top of chocolate cake, where it would also taste great.

This recipe is heavenly and heavy and definitely my favorite cake that I’ve ever made! It was really hard to stop eating it. I got the recipe from Deb at Smitten Kitchen, and am so grateful to her for posting such an amazing dessert! I adapted her recipe for the frosting and the ganache to make them vegan, but substituted the basic Chocolate Cake recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking in for the cake layers, so that it would be a bit lighter than the sour cream chocolate cake that Deb used. It was still moist and definitely over-the-top rich!