A slightly altered version of Smitten Kitchen’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake, for Kirsty’s birthday.

I cooked it in three 8-inch square pans, rather than 8-inch rounds (because I’m always happy to find new uses for the wedding cake pans.) It is a very soft cake and definitely requires freezing before constructing and icing, but I didn’t have any problems with it breaking or sinking.

As I was taking the cake to work, I decided the chocoate peanut-butter glaze was too difficult. Instead, I iced the cake with the peanut butter frosting (a gloriously rich concotion of cream cheese, butter, icing sugar and peanut butter), and decorated it with chocolate buttons. Incredibly rich, but a beautiful combination of flavours (unless you’re strongly opposed to the idea of chocolate and peanut butter). It didn’t suffer from the absence of the chocolate glaze – in fact, the cake is so rich I think the addition of another layer of chocolate would have been a bit too much.