Chocolate Peppermint Cake

I love the holidays. I know I'm delayed in sharing this passion since the holidays are primarily over but I've been busy actually enjoying the season (imagine that!). I have always been excited to have a holiday party but lack the popularity to justify one. Until this year (not that I have become extremely popular but I had a group of people searching for a venue) when I finally got to decorate my apartment for more than just myself. Naturally this also meant creating a fabulous dessert. It was a potluck so baby steps towards full-on production.

Blended egg whites. Who knew?

Being slightly ambitious to impress people, I chose the chocolate peppermint roll cake. That's right, I was going to roll a cake. Step 1: separate 6 eggs. No problemo. Step 2: whip egg whites until fluffy. This presents a slight problem given my lack of mixer and trust me, trying to make stiff egg whites by hand is remarkably time-consuming. Obviously this wasn't working so well so I resorted to the blender. It seems to do the same thing as a mixer, it makes the egg whites go really fast, right? Well, it does work, to some degree. Since you add them by thirds, I just kept whipping them in separate quantities.

Mmm, batter.

Once I folded in these lovely egg whites into my fluffy batter, the next step was to spread the batter on a baking sheet, 12x17. Perfect! I have that size sheet. Buuut the batter didn't quite fit the pan. Again, no problem, I can just make most of the sheet covered with batter. As I placed the tray into the oven I thought "huh, my oven is kind of small, didn't I try to fit this in here when I bought it?". The answer is 'yes', I did attempt to fit this 12x17 in there before and the reason I have never used it is because no, it doesn't fit. So I guess it's okay to bake this cake with the oven door slightly open, right? Right.

Mind the gap.

Next, while the cake was baking, I 'whipped' the peppermint stuff in the blender (again, much faster than try to whip cream into whipped cream by hand). Finally, it came time to rooooll the cake. Now, I knew this would be difficult and I just kept thinking how awesome it would be to make this giant yoddell thing. As I rolled it, I could tell I was going to slowly because it was totally going to break. And it did but I kept going and it turned out just fine, it just lacked a roll layer in the middle.

It's logs, it's logs!

The final step was to pour ganache over the whole thing. Ganache is apparently just thick hot chocolate, it's just chocolate chips and cream. Delicious. The picture has it drizzled in a beautiful manner over the cake. I just poured the whole thing on there and drowned the cake in a chocolate lake of ganache (I really like the word ganache).

The cake was a success and I definitely had some leftover. Chocolate for dinner? I think yes.