Charli Ann’s Easter Bunny Fault Line Cake

​Part One: Cake

This recipe is for 2 6-inch layers. We’re making 3 8-inch layers, though, so you’ll want to double it. The recipe on the video is slightly different, so use this one instead:

​Recipe

​7 TB unsweetened cocoa
3 cups all purpose flour
1 TB baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. salt
1½ cups sugar 
3 eggs
1½ cups mayonnaise
1½ tsp. pure vanilla extract
1½ cups cold coffee

​1.Preheat oven to 350°F, and grease 3 8-inch cake pans.

2. Whisk together some of the dry ingredients: cocoa, flour, baking soda, and salt into a medium bowl, mix well.

3. The eggs, sugar and vanilla extract go into the bowl of a stand mixer, where you’ll mix it on medium speed for about three minutes. It should be nice and fluffy (eggs and sugar do beautiful things together!)

4. Now for the mayonnaise. I know it sounds weird, but there’s no butter in this cake, so the mayo is where the fat comes from, and the fat is what makes it tender and keeps it moist. Yum…  So, combine the mayonnaise into the mix.

5. All that’s left is coffee and the dry ingredients from step one, so just add them alternately in two or three parts each at low speed so that the batter never gets overly soupy or dry, but do not over beat. As cake batters go, this one is fairly thin, but between the eggs, baking powder, and baking soda, it has plenty of leavening, so never fear. 

4. Pour batter into cake pans and bake for 30 minutes or until done. Now, a tip on how to tell if it’s done... stick a wooden toothpick in the middle and if it comes out clean, it’s ready. Or, if this isn’t your first cake rodeo, a quick tap on top that let’s the cake spring back will tell you.

​5. When the layers are done and completely cooled, freeze them just a little bit, and level the tops. After that, it’s time for your crumb icing layer, but I guess you’d better make the icing first!

Part Two: Icing

Oh, I love icing! Some people say that cake is just an excuse to have icing! I totally get that! Yum!

Chocolate Swiss Meringue Buttercream
Enough for a 6 inch cake--you’ll need to do this twice for our 8 inch cake.
 
American buttercream, the kind that uses mostly butter and powdered sugar, is what most of us know. Swiss meringue is a partially cooked icing, a technique that gives it an especially silky texture, and it has a couple of extra ingredients to make it work. In the video, I call it Italian meringue but, oops! It’s not. It’s Swiss meringue, a different, and lovely, thing. It starts out with something very familiar, though:  CHOCOLATE!
 
12 ounces semi-sweet or milk chocolate
Use a good brand, because if it doesn’t melt well (and some brands don’t because they have additives), your icing won’t turn out.
Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or in a heatproof bowl placed over simmering water. Now I’m going to remind you to BE PATIENT, because if you try to rush it, the chocolate can burn or turn grainy and seize up. Just to be safe, take it off the heat before it’s completely melted and stir until the last bits smooth out. Put it aside to cool it a little.

Now, combine these in the bowl of your mixer:
1 cup granulated sugar
¼ tsp salt
⅛ tsp cream of tartar
4 large egg whites
 
Whisk together just to combine. I hope you didn’t put away that double boiler, because you’ll need it again for this step. You want to warm this mixture a little, not much, but enough to start melting the sugar. You don’t want to cook the eggs, though. It should still be a thick solution when you’re done. Now, the fun part. Whip it! After about 3 minutes whipping on high with the whisk attachment of your mixer, the eggs should be full of air, fluffy, thick, glossy, and almost room temperature. This is important, because the next thing you’re going to add is butter and you don’t want it to melt.
 
2 cups unsalted butter at room temperature.
Cut into tablespoon sized pieces. Mix them at low speed into the buttercream a tablespoon at a time until they’re all incorporated, then turn the mixer all the way up and let it do what it does best for another three minutes. 

​Now, grab up that melted chocolate, which should also be room temperature by now, but still liquidy, and stir it in, giving it a final whip, and you are good to go!
 
Before you go further, you’d better get your cake layers ready.  To do this, take the frozen cake layers, spread enough icing between the layers for filling, pile them on top of each other, and use the bench scraper to smooth a very thin layer of icing around the edges and on top. Then, you probably already know the drill--back into the freezer!

Part 3: Fondant

This is where it starts to look like something!

​We’re going to use fondant to make the little shapes for this and, if you don’t know what fondant is, well it’s icing. Kind of. It’s basically sugar and marshmallow so it’s edible, but probably only for the people who REALLY love icing, because it’s made to sculpt shapes with, so when it’s used, there’s A LOT of it. We’ll be making homemade fondant in a future episode (Stay Tuned!), but for today, you’ll be fine simply getting a package of it from the store,

The first thing we’re going to make is little carrots, so you want to tint the fondant orange. When you tint fondant, or any kind of dough, the best way is to pat the dough or fondant into kind of a circle and put a small amount of the coloring in the center, then fold the edges in so the color is completely inside, and start to knead.

Shape a bunch (!) of carrots about three inches long. You’ll want enough to space them pretty closely around the outside of the cake. Then, tint some fondant green for the carrot stems, roll it out, and cut the shape that seems best for you. I cut three little heart shapes for each stem and wound them around one another to look kind of like leaves. 

This is where watching the video REALLY helps. It’s much easier to see the shapes come together than to try to describe them. This is also the part when my friend Ella joins in and I want you to meet her, too!
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Now, let all the shapes dry for about a half hour, and you can put little lines in the carrots’ circumference by pushing and pulling on them. The outside will be set while the inside is still moldable. Again, check out the video. I’ll show you exactly how to do it.
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It’s time for the bunny bottom! Take a ball of fondant between two and three inches in diameter, tint it gray, and roll it into a smooth ball by tucking all the edges into the middle. For the tail, do the same thing for a ball about a half inch in diameter. I moistened the tail in water and rolled it in sprinkles, then attached it to the body, again with a little water. Now, make little feet in the same way and attach them, too, and you have a bunny booty! Then, to make it extra cute, I made little pink paw pads, too! There’s no head or ears on this bunny! He’s digging in!

Part Four: Final Assembly
 
Everything is ready!

​First, crush about a dozen chocolate cookies. These will be your dirt. 
Give the sides of the cake a thin coat of chocolate icing over the crumb coat and line up your cute orange carrots all along the outside. Chill a bit so they stick. Ice the top. Next, pipe a line of buttercream on the top edge of the cake right above the carrots, then another one right below them. No tip needed.  Now, give it a turn with the bench scraper so that the icing just covers the top and bottom edges of the carrots, enclosing them as though they were in a little package.
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​Now, smooth the top one more time, place the bunny bottom in the middle, tail up, and the stems around the top edge. Sprinkle a little chocolate dirt in the free spaces on the top, and there you have it! Cute as a button! Or a bunny! Or a bunny bottom!