Birthday Sugar Coma

There is a woman in New York who is trying to kill me. I've never met her, so I cannot think of what I could have done to provoke this. She keeps posting these beautiful cakes and other delicacies on her blog, SmittenKitchen, just egging me on, "try this, I know you wanna...it's not that bad for you."

Everything I have ever made based on Smittenkitchen's blog has been successful, and that is a testament to her cooking and baking talents, not mine. So when it came time to baking my own, yes, my own, birthday cake, I knew right where to look for the perfect thing. Chocolate and peanut butter cake? Yes, please.

Click on the above link to SmittenKitchen for the complete recipe. This is a fairly labor intensive cake, but well worth it. I had never made a layered cake before, so that in itself was intimidating, but I was excited to try something new. Frosting with peanut butter frosting was another challenge. It wasn't "peanuty" enough for me, so I added more peanut butter, which made it too crumbly. So I added some milk to the frosting to thin it out because it was too hard to work with otherwise. The thinned out version was a dream to frost with, and the additional peanut butter enhanced the flavor, in my opinion.

But wait, there's more. Just when you thought you couldn't consume any more calories per slice, now you can! Because as the last step in this journey toward a certain diabetic coma, you also get to pour a layer of chocolate peanut butter ganache on top of the whole darn thing. Yes, you heard right. More chocolate, more peanut butter. As you can see, the original version has ganache draped just so over the frosting. But the recipe made so much ganache, I couldn't bare to throw any away, so I frosted the whole cake with it. Why the heck not, right?

Finally, when she suggests, ever so politely, that you keep a glass of milk handy when sampling the cake, listen to the woman, she knows of which she speaks.