The names Cake... Chocolate Cake.

A friends birthday was on Sunday, and somehow me making a cake was brought into play. I had a half flat of strawberries left over from Jam-a-Thon, so adding those somehow was for sure in the cards. My first offering was a white cream cake (which I'll still probably make this week sometime), but we settled on a dark chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and strawberry filling.

I found recipes for both the cake and frosting pretty fast, but had a much tougher time finding a good recipe for the filling. I had in my head exactly what I wanted and I just couldn't find it. I wanted a clear glaze to spread over sliced berries, but found this recipe and decided to settle for it (*note, I used the second recipe*).

I ended up baking it at my wonderful sister's place and it went pretty well. I made both the filling and butter cream before hand because I wanted to make sure that both set right. It's a good thing I did, because the filling set like crap (half because the directions are crap and half because I was too impatient to go "wait, that doesn't look right"). If you do finding yourself using this recipe, be sure to cook the mixture AFTER you add the corn starch and sugar. Some people may find that a 'duh' thing. I didn't. And I ended up having to re-heat a fairly cold mixture to try and get it to gel at all. The butter cream turned out perfect (I made a half-portion extra since I wasn't doing a sheet cake). The taste was spot on, although I think I would have liked a richer chocolate color.

The cake was very simple and cooked great. We let it cool, then slice each layer in half (the more filling the better I say). I used a piping bag with a large round tip to ring the edges of each layer so the filling didn't squeeze out. I then added the slice berries and topped it with the jam-like filling (place on next layer and repeat).

The cake turned out beautiful!