Chocolate Mint Oreo Cake

Here's the last of my little mini cakes I brought to the cake auction, but certainly not the least! I wanted to keep this little darling sooo badly, but the price definitely shot up there very quickly, and I wasn't about to pay that much for this cake. 

Okay, I lie. It would have been totally worth it to drop those paper presidents on this baby. 

As promised, today I'm sharing the details for this lovely chocolate mint oreo cake - let's dive right in! 

For starters, I used this amazing chocolate cupcake recipe, and converted the cooking time and temperature into a cake recipe. It was super-soft and left the cake dense enough, but soft enough, to play the perfect counterpart to the layers of frosting I was going to add to it. 

The frosting was just a regular mint buttercream (adding a touch of mint extract to my regular vanilla bean frosting ). It tasted great with the chocolate cake, but it could have been 100 times better... you see, I threw myself under the bus big-time. Originally, I wanted to make my mint butter cream that uses cream cheese. Why? Well, it tastes like a dream, and would have been the perfect way to elevate this cake to the high heavens. Unfortunately, this blondie forgot the cream cheese, and was in the thick of frosting cakes that she couldn't go to the store for yet another ingredient. 

Moral of the story: make your lists carefully. ;) 

Anyway, I'm not a fan of a bare cake bottom, so I warmed a chef's knife with hot water, and then sliced the oreos in half. The heating helps a clean cut though the oreos, without letting the oreo decide which way it's going to slice/crumble. I rimmed the bottom of the cake with the oreos cut-side down. 

So let's talk about the ganache. Ganache can be the sweetest little darling on the planet, or it can be the devil reincarnated. IT WAS THE LATTER for me that day. I wanted to rip my hair out! Little did I realize at the time, the problem wasn't the ganache, it was the blondie who forgot to add enough heavy cream to the melted chocolate. The thicker the ganache, the harder it is to control the drips. See how thick it is? A little bit more of heavy cream would have done it wonders. However, I still think it looks nice and oozy/drippy. I used some dark chocolate cocoa, so the ganache definitely had a bite to it. 

I then used some leftover mint butter cream and piped some swirls on the top like a cupcake, and then placed more oreo halves in between each one. A few little edible pears dolled it up just a little bit more, and the cake was finished! I wish I could have seen what it looked like sliced open, but then again, I would have had to buy my own cake at the auction! That would have been one expensive little cake-slice-photo. :) I did receive a message from the buyer's wife that they LOVED the cake - I just love these flavors, and am so happy they did, too. Happy weekend, darling friends & readers!