Saturday, March 20, 2010

Day and Night Cake

I normally make this cake with three layers, but three round 9inch layers. We had a Russian Dinner at our church to benefit the Hand in Hand mission an our summer trip to Belarus. I was asked to bring a cake along with something else. Almost everyone I know loves what we call "Day and Night" cake as it consists of a white layer and a black (chocolate) layer. Since I was asked to bring a cake for a benefit dinner where I knew there would be a lot of people, I wanted to make a larger "Party" version of this cake. If you want the measurements of the regular sized cake, please e-mail me. Also, on this post I have only posted the ingredients and the step-by-step instructions for the actual layers. You will also need to make the Whipped Cream Frosting and a ganache drizzle (optional). I will post those recipes in a separate blog. So here it is... my "Day and Night Cake"... The Party Size Version.

Day and Night Cake
Party Size

Here is what you will need: (just for the layers)

******This is for 2 layers****
If making individual layers, one at a time, you will use half of the ingredients below each time!


*4 eggs
*2 cups sugar
(I know it looks like milk or cream in the pic)
*2 cups sour cream
*2 cups flour
*2 Tablespoons Baking Cocoa
*2 teaspoons baking soda

1. First you need to take and add your baking soda to the sour cream.. This will carbonate the soda so that you won't taste it.
... Just mix it around....
...and let it do it's thing.
2. In the meantime, make your layers. Since I probably have a little OCD and wanted my layers to be perfectly equal size I made the cake batter twice, once for each layer. Meaning what I am going to show you in Steps 2- I did twice except that the second time I added cocoa before pouring the batter in the pan. If you would like you can do this once and just pour half of the white batter into the 1st pan, and then add the cocoa to the remaining batter and also pour that into the 2nd pan. (Ok, Have I confused you enough???)

Either way.... first, in the bowl of an electric mixer, mix 2 eggs with 1 cup sugar until you get a light yellow color.

3. Add the sour cream and mix until incorporated.
4. Now add 1 cup flour and mix thoroughly.

5. Now if are doing one layer at a time, pour the filling into a 9X13 greased sheet pan and do the same thing all over except this time add cocoa. If you are doing this once, pour half the cake batter into a 9x13 greased sheet pan and add cocoa to the second half and mix thoroughly.
6. Whichever way you end up going, you will eventually have 2 cake pans, one chocolate and one white ready to go in the oven.
7. Bake them at 350F for 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
8. Let them cool right in the pans.... Once they have cooled you can put cream on them. For some reason my chocolate layer came out larger than my white layer, so I decided to slice it in half and ended up with three layers. You don't have to do this but the more cream you put between layers, the more moist the cake will be.
9. Now evenly spread a good layer of cream on each layer...


10. Also cream the top and sides of the cake.
11. If using ganache drizzle, put the cake in the fridge while you make it and then when it is hot, pour it however you would like on top of the cake. You can cover the whole cake top as I did in my Chunky Monkey Cake or just drizzle on top.
I wish I had a picture of a cake piece, but since I took it to church I wasn't able to get one this time.

2 comments :

  1. looks really good! i'd have to try it :)

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  2. I have eaten Day and Night many times and its amazing, my favorite cake!
    I haven't done anything like this before, but I think that I am gonna try to make it! Do you recon that beginner will be fine to make this?

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