Step by step homemade baking recipes
Today my guest host Paityn joins me on a Backpack Baking adventure! We are hiking to a local lookout in the Canadian Rocky Mountains where we use the Bemco Backpacking oven to make three different Oreo Mug Cakes. You can make these mug cakes in the microwave, or in a regular oven at home.
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This cake is for chocolate lovers only. In fact, you should probably be obsessed with chocolate in order to make this cake since every component has chocolate; from the chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream base, to the swirled chocolate wafer sticks wrapped around it, to the chocolate candy chunks on top!
Imagine this . . . hazelnut core, nutella hazelnut wafers, chocolate hazelnut coating. You with me?
Sound familiar? Like a Ferrero Rocher you say? Well, it is, but in GIANT form!
I’ve been wanting to make a homemade ferrero rocher every since I made homemade nutella. But, rather than making regular sized ones, I opted to go big. “Go big or go home” is what my brother used to say. He was referring to hockey and not chocolate, but that’s not important. When I’m referring to chocolate, I’m always referring to going BIG.
Hazelnuts are the main flavouring component to a ferrero. I find it next to impossible to find hazelnuts already roasted. To roast the hazelnuts, simply line a baking tray with parchment paper, and toast for 15-20 mins at 325F. Once the hazelnuts are fragrant and toasted, allow them to cool, and peel the skins from the nuts. They’re now ready to use!
To make the giant ferrero rocher, the general idea is to encase a hazelnut/hazelnut butter mixture, nutella wafers and coat the entire thing in chocolate and crushed hazelnuts.
If you prefer to stick with the smaller, traditional size, you can definitely do that with this recipe too. Instead of using the hazelnut butter and hazelnuts to make the core, simply use a single hazelnut. Wrap the hazelnut in the nutella mixture, roll into a ball, roll in nuts and finally melted chocolate.
What to call a pie in a cake?? A “pake”? A “cie”? Or what about “Cherappkin”? Appcherrkin? Pumpcherple? CHERPUMPLE!
I think I’m going to stick with “Pie in a cake”. It much easier to figure out what in the world I’m talking about!
This cake is admittedly time consuming since you have to bake three pies ahead of time, as well as prepare two types of cake batter. It’s definitely an investment in your life, but it is bound to impress anyone that looks at it. And most likely they’ll have to look at it twice to figure out what in the world they are looking at!
To make the investment of time shorter, using premade pies from a grocery store bakery work excellently, as does using box mixes for the cake batter. In the recipe below I have provided the link to all of our homemade versions of the pies, and cakes, if you are so inclinded for this big project.
Since the cake was such a big project, I went with an easy, light covering. Instead of using a heavy buttercream, I thought whipping cream would be best paired with the cakes/pies. After all, there is a lot going on in this cake, so the last thing it needed was another element to confuse the taste buds.
You can choose to go with any flavour of cake batter, as well as any type of pie when you’re making your own version of this. The hardest part of that will be trying to name it!
When you’re baking your pies, make sure that they are at least an inch (2 centimeters) smaller than your cake pan. This will ensure that there is just enough room for the cake batter to completely envelop the pie. You want to make sure that you spread the cake batter on the bottom, sides and top so that the batter prevents any of the pie from escaping while baking- especially in the fruit pies! Roughly, I wanted an inch (2cm) of cake batter underneath and on top of the pie to help prevent that from happening.
This “PAKE”, “CIE”, whatever you want to call it is super fun to make. I hope you have a blast !
I usually put my blog posts up when the video goes live in the mornings, but Paul and I have been fortunate enough to have spent the last four days in Toronto hanging out (and working) at Buffer Festival! Which means the Paul end of things (the video) was scheduled and ready to go before we even left, and the Jenn end of things (the blog post) was not. I apologize to those of you who wait to hear my insightful additions to our current video in the form of the blog. Thanks for that Mom. Actually, I don’t even think she reads it! She’s really great at sharing on Facebook though 🙂
The last couple days, and months, and pretty much year have been incredible ones for Paul and I. We are incredibly fortunate to have dream jobs as creators on YouTube. Neither of us had been to Toronto before, and I love it here! I love the shopping, I love the culture and I love that there is any kind of food you could imagine here! We had the most amazing Thai food right behind our hotel our first night here. I haven’t seen a cupcake though. It’s been a nice break from them. We attended the Buffer Festival Industry day on Thursday and set up a booth to serve our Pumpkin Spice Latte cupcakes. Make sure you check us out on Facebook and Instagram for pictures of all the fun things we did that day. On Friday we attended a couple of screenings; Rhett and Link, and Epic Meal Time. Rhett and Link seem like incredibly nice guys, and their screening was great to sit through. They showed the audience the evolution of their channel(s) and we even got to watch Monday’s upload ahead of time! It’s a great one! The EMT screening was a showing of a couple of episodes of their new TV series, Epic Meal Empire. It was great to see those guys in person as well, and I even met Harley on the street . . . and totally fan girled on him. I was supposed to be professional, but that didn’t happen! I’ve watched him for so long, that I was just honored to be able to talk to him. Last night we finished the night off with a creator party at the pop-up YouTube Space TO, and had a blast. Google always treats us incredibly well. At the party, we were in the company of amazingly talented people . . . to name drop unabashedly, my friends Harley, Rhett, Link, and Shay Carl. There were soooooo many others that I knew were amazing creators, but being so busy, I don’t have a lot of time to consume my own medium! This morning, with very little sleep, we headed off to YTSTO again, for a couple of workshops. One on Creator Development, which we have had before, but it’s always good to have a recap and check in, and then another presentation from Rhett and Link. They have created themselves quite the empire and they have so many exciting things in store- including a new morning show with women!
Anyway, that’s the long winded reason why my blog post is late. “Jenn,” you ask, “can’t you schedule your blog posts like Paul schedules the videos?” Yes, I can. But I can’t figure out our server’s time zone!
I’ve been wanting to do these devil cupcakes since last October. I wanted to do them last year, but we ran out of time. I figure waiting a year to see if I really like an idea is probably a good thing. If I still really liked it, then I would definitely make it. I don’t have any regrets when it comes to cake videos we’ve uploaded, but there are some ideas that looking back, I know I could have done them better. When I’m developing an idea/recipe, I want to make it as fabulous as possible. So when thinking about what would go well with a devil cupcake, devil’s food cake was the obvious choice!
The difficulty for this recipe came when attempting to dip the cupcakes. If you do not place them in the fridge, the buttercream is likely to plop off and fall directly into your red melted chocolate. Make sure it’s solidly set on the cupcake before dipping, or you’ll ruin your red chocolate like I did while practicing!
If you’re still with me and reading, thanks again Mom, I won’t take up anymore of your time . . . so here is the super simple video for how to make your own Devil Cupcakes.
Do you have a bunch of leftover jelly beans from an Easter egg hunt? Well, I have the perfect way to use them up! I would love to be able to tell you that I was “using mine up” but, no, I went to the Bulk Barn (I should have frequent flier miles there) and bought all brand new jelly beans for this project.
I absolutely adore this cake. I think that it is beautiful, and the shock value of the inside is second to nothing I have seen. I contemplated using vanilla cake, but I felt the darkness of the chocolate cake really accentuated the bright vibrancy of the buttercreams.
Now, I am a buttercream LOVER, but if you aren’t (what is wrong with you?!) you can make the layers of the buttercream thinner but only making one stripe for each ring. But, if you do that, keep in mind that your cake will not be as shocking when you cut into it. The point of a cake like this is to make it look amazing when it is sliced into . . . and for it to taste amazing!!
I went with an outer colour of white buttercream for the cake to mimic a cloud like appearance . . . did I achieve that!?! Haha. I also think that the white makes a clean slate for the jelly beans to sit on nice and brightly!
I hope you enjoy this cake, I know I loved making it!
