Ian’s 2nd Birthday Cake – Chocolate Peanut Butter

Ian has been going nuts over peanut butter lately, so for this year, we decided to make the Triple Chocolate Peanut Butter cake I made awhile ago.  This time around, I did do something a little different.

The first time I made this, I used a standard cake pan along with two cake mixes and smashed the filling between the two.  This time around, I had a couple of torte pans so I wanted to try making a filling cake with them.   Now, if you’re not familiar with a torte pan, they are designed with a well in the top, giving you space to add fruit or anything without it sliding off the cake – and they are suppose to be layered with the wells facing up.  So for this recipe, I had the bottom layer with the well up and the top layer with the well down.  This worked to an extent.  It made adding the filling to the cake and frosting it so much easier, but transporting the cake wasn’t as pretty.

Basically, what I did was mixed up one cake mix as the directions indicated and split the batter between the two torte pans.  Then, inverting one cake, I layered the peanut butter filling in the well, making it heap a little.  Then I took the other cake out of the pan and left the well facing down.  This made it so the top was completely smooth and gave a cavern shape for the filling to fill.

The cake was gorgeous (can’t you tell by the picture :P), but after it sat for a few hours, when we tried bringing it home, the top slid off, creating a mess galore.  We were able to put the top back on the cake with little destructive force, but we did lose about 2 cups of the filling doing that.

Now this was both a blessing and a curse.  The negative being the obvious, but one of the comments about the cake this time around was the peanut butter filling made the cake really REALLY rich.  A lot of that was my fault since the original recipe creating filling for a much larger cake and I didn’t adjust the amounts.  So getting rid of some of the filling was a good thing.  So here’s the recipe I would use for the filling:

Ingredients:
1 (8oz) container Cream cheese
2 cup Peanut butter, creamy
4 cups Sugar, powdered
1 tbsp Vanilla
8 tbsp Milk

Directions:

1. Beat cream cheese and peanut butter until combined. Add powdered sugar and vanilla and beat until combined. Add the milk and beat until combined.