The Best for Birthday - Part 23

Every year I like finding a new semi-outrageous cake to make for my husband's birthday. Twenty three years of knowing him, and it gets a little more challenging every year to find a new recipe within the challenge scope I'm willing to take on. 

Most years I have him pick a flavor profile--chocolate and peanut butter, chocolate and toffee, or German chocolate--and then I search for a recipe. This year he chose chocolate and peanut butter. I've made a lot of chocolate and peanut butter combinations over the years, and I really didn't want to repeat one. Lucky for me, I have far more Pinterest pins than I know what to do with. I searched on chocolate peanut butter cake on my boards and found that somewhere, sometime, I saved Puppy Chow Cake. I knew the Puppy Chow Cake would be perfect because it is his favorite wizard flavor (a local ice cream shop's version of a Blizzard) of all time. The recipe seemed pretty doable, if a little long. 

There are two cake flavors to make. I made one and half recipes of both the peanut butter and chocolate flavors, and baked them as eight inch layers. I don't have six inch pans, and frankly, I didn't want to deal with the six inch layers. I must now admit that I did not follow the instructions for the chocolate cake and the sprinkling of the dry ingredients. It seemed a little crazy, and I don't think it mattered in the end result. I just tried not to overmix. The peanut butter layer was really tasty--good peanut butter flavor that didn't knock you over.

For the puppy chow, most recipes use peanut butter and chocolate chips rather than peanut butter and chocolate chips both. I knew the peanut butter flavor would be stronger if I didn't use chips, so I used this recipe. 

I also decided to use my favorite buttercream recipe that I no longer can find online. Luckily, I have it on paper. The secret is using salted butter, plus salt and heavy cream. 

This cake was yummy and super sweet. The puppy chow layers made it a little challenging to cut smoothly, but the crunch it added was awesome. This cake was definitely a hit. You could also definitely make this with chocolate peanut butter swirl cupcakes, frosting, and a puppy chow for the topping. Those would be a lot of fun.