Chocolate Cake with Rich Chocolate Cream Frosting and Raspberry Filling

This cake was made for a friend's birthday, a chocolate-chocolate-raspberry request! I used my usual go to chocolate cake recipe, substituting 3/4 cup fresh coffee+ 3/4 warm water, instead of just 1 and 1/2 cups warm water. This cake is great, but you have to keep an eye on it because I've had it go dry on me very quickly and I loathe dry cake, who doesn't? I baked my three 8" pans for 15 minutes, rotated them and baked another 10 minutes and then toothpick checked them—not even close to being ready. I baked and checked for two 5 minute intervals until the toothpick was clean.

I set aside the cakes to cool and went about my other errands for the day. Later in the afternoon I made the raspberry filling and chocolate cream frosting. I halved the raspberry recipe which still yielded more than enough, but I could have been more generous with it in between the layers.

The chocolate cream frosting...the taste was delicious, the consistency, eh. The description describes it as soft and rich, mine started to set so quickly as I was frosting the cake—it resembled a ganache, it's consistency was like the inside of a truffle. Maybe I chilled it to long, maybe I over stirred? Sous chef hubs had to keep whisking to "warm" it as I was frosting the cake. This recipe is from Cook's Illustrated's New Best Recipe's. I took the below recipe and added another half of the ingredients for my extra cake layer.

Rich Chocolate Cream Frosting
(yields 3 cups, enought to ice one 8 or 9" two layer cake)

16 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate chopped fine
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1/3 cup light corn syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Place choc in heatproof bowl. Bring the cream to a simmer in a small saucepan over med-high heat, pour over choc. Add the corn syrup and let stand for three minutes. Whisk gently until smooth, Stir in vanilla. Refrigerate 1 to 1 1/2 hours, stirring every 15 minutes, until the mixture reaches a spreadable consistency. This frosting does not keep well, use within a day.

Assembly of the cake:
The bottom two layers, I cut off the top, about 1/4" to level off the surface. I was skimpy with the leveling because I wanted good height. I ended up having plenty of height and some pesky round edges in the layers that were a pain to cover with frosting. I added a layer of chocolate cream, then raspberry filling, then another layer of chocolate cream to the clean underside of the next layer. Same on the second layer and then finished off the whole cake with the choc. cream. It was good, but not great. I will likely not make the frosting again, it needed to be creamier. I loved the raspberry filling, but need to add double what I did.