“As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot…Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.”

– Mark Helprin.

Coffee. And chocolate. In a cake. Life is good.

I’ve been wanting to work on my cake decorating skills (always a weakness for me), so this beauty of a mocha cake is all decked out for spring. For Easter, to be exact. (I’m delighted to be sharing the cake with some dear friends but we’ll see if it makes it until Sunday.) Flavor’s not usually an issue for me, and the Swiss meringue buttercream came out beautifully. The chocolate bird’s nest, however…well, we’ll have to see. And don’t even get me started on the white chocolate bird’s eggs.

The Mocha Cake

My recipe for mocha cake is pretty straight-forward. (And delicious.) The one tip I have is to dust the cake pans with cocoa powder before baking. Why not add an extra layer of yum?

The Swiss Meringue Buttercream

I’m not a huge fan of frosting, especially the overly-sweet, sugary kind typical of American buttercream and featured on a lot of cakes and cupcakes. Now a cream cheese, or really buttery frosting, sign me up.

Which is probably why Swiss meringue buttercream is my favorite for cakes – all that butter! (Though I like the Italian meringue method for macarons.) I’ve played with this recipe a bit and this is the combo of egg whites, sugar, and butter that I feel works the best. It’s a pretty stable meringue, easy to remedy when it goes awry, and ends up super fluffy and creamy.

The Chocolate and Candy Eggs

Okay, here’s where we reach the “Reality Bakes” part of the post. Two tries with tempering and dyeing white chocolate and my robin’s eggs still came out a sort of muddy teal color, and wouldn’t set properly.

I suspect the culprit was the oil candy dye, because the original melted chocolate was the perfect temperature and beautiful and glossy. I had to add so much of the dye to get (close to) the desired color that I think it screwed it up, even though I warmed the oil coloring first.

Still, I learned a few things, so for what it’s worth:

• When dyeing white chocolate, you should use oil-based candy coloring, not the water-based ones. I had a heck of a time finding oil-based colors and want to give a word of warning: Google searches for oil colors will take you to dyes that are actually water-based. I was stuck mixing blue with a little yellow of the AmeriColor brand but could never achieve the bright robin’s egg blue I was after.
• I had some sky blue candy melts on hand in case the white chocolate didn’t work out (I had a feeling) and they came out pretty well. Easy to use, too. You just melt the chips in the microwave and pour them into the molds. My problem was that I was using small egg molds which require you to stick the two halves together, leaving an obvious seam. I used a little of the melted candy to stick the halves together, then very lightly dipped my finger in warm water and rubbed it over the ugly seam to smooth it out.
• Or, you could just buy Cadbury eggs like normal people and use those.

The Chocolate Nest

I enjoy chocolate work and was excited to try out some new techniques from Ann Reardon and her site How To Cook That. I could have gone the corn flake or chow mein noodles route, but I loved how twiggy and real Ann’s nests look. And…chocolate.

I guess it was just one of those days because my first nest collapsed. Right after that my frosting bag split down the middle and shot chocolate all over the kitchen.

Round two came out much better but it’s a delicate little thing, that nest. And I had to stick it in the freezer to firm it up. Check out Ann’s video and give it a try sometime. I’d love to hear how it works out for you.