Mint Chocolate Cake

Over the weekend I made a 2-layer mint chocolate cake. I used one 9" round pan and one 8" round pan. This cake was the same shape as the lemon cake I made last week. To make the cake taste like mint, I added about 2 teaspoons of peppermint extract to the chocolate batter. Some people may want to add more or less extract, depending on how minty they want the cake.

I made buttercream icing using the recipe on the back of the powdered sugar package (butter, powdered sugar, milk, vanilla extract) but I added an extra teaspoon of vanilla extract to the icing for more flavor. After making the icing, I mixed 1 drop of green food coloring, but saw that it was not minty-green enough, so I added 1 more drop. Perfect!

After letting the cakes cool, I transferred the 9" one to a silver platter and began icing this cake just in the middle, because for the design I was going to do, I thought it would be easier to ice certain parts of the cake, then decorate, and ice the rest. Well, this proved to be more annoying than helpful, so I decided to ice the entire cake.

For the decorations, I used mini chocolate chip morsels and sprinkled them around the sides of the 2 cakes. The bottom layer was much easier to apply chocolate chips to, because if they did not stick to the side they would fall on the plate, which was fine. But for the top layer, if the chocolate chips did not stick to the side, then they would fall on the bottom layer and I would have to pick them off (once you see the next picture this will make more sense).

When putting the chocolate chips on the top layer, I had to put them on one by one so they would not fall, kind of tedious, but totally worth it. For a little extra pizazz, I put some on the top of the cake, too. I was going to flavor the icing with peppermint extract as well, but like the lemon cake, I didn't want to have a mint overload!