Christmas Tree Cake

When I saw Cakecrumb's cake, and her tutorial as to how to make it, I knew I had to try making it. But first on a small scale. I basically followed her recipe for the cakes, except I used egg replacer instead of eggs. I must say I did not expect the dark chocolate to rise so much, and since I had divided it into two little springform pans (roughly 12 cm each).

I had a bit of a hard time carving the dark chocolate mudcake to put in the white cake mix due to a lack of round cookie cutters. As mentioned previously, I have been using emptied tomato concentrate cans to cut cookies. For these, I had to use various objects to approximate the round shapes -- from a simple knotted thread pulled taut from the central toothpick, to small cups and glasses. I couldn't be sure how successful the inside would be until the cutting.

Seems it was at least mostly a success! I was very afraid that the cake would be overly sweet, especially the white part, since it has a lot of white chocolate and it's mixed with white chocolate ganache. But seems the nap in the fridge (and me reducing the amount of sugar by almost half) did the trick to make it pleasant to the tongue without being overly sweet.

For the decorations, I simply piped some Christmas trees using white chocolate, and a small 6-pointed pseudo snowflake from the little remaining at the end. The one at the top was piped as 4 separate half trees. I then used a knife dipped in hot water then dried, and pressed against the edge to "glue" together, to melt the chocolate into a flat surface to attach to the other parts.

Definitely a recipe to try again, but not too often, as the 2-hour baking time for the white cake is not something I can do a lot.

With the carved-out scraps and cut off domes from the dark chocolate cake, and what remained of the crumb mix from the white chocolate cake, I made little cake truffles with leftover ganache and some coconut.