Cream Cheese Chocolate Kiwi Cake

Christmas is coming to an end soon. For this year's Christmas, I decided to bake a cake. Initially, I wanted to bake Yule Log. Then, I sort of failed it because I felt unwell all of sudden and all baking mood went off. I messed up everything and ended up in frustration. Two days after that, the baking mood rose up again. The first thing that I did after I woke up was to bake -

Let me introduce you my first baked frosted cake. Initially, all I wanted to bake was just a chiffon cake. In the end, I put all my effort and time in it to produce a Christmas cake. I made the frosting from scratch, thus there isn't much recipe to share on that.

Cream Cheese Chocolate Kiwi Cake 

INGREDIENTS 

Chiffon cake 

Took from Jenny Wong Chew Kim 

A: 

30g of Cocoa powder mixed with 120ml hot water 

4 egg yolks 

60g sugar 

130g self raising flour 

1/2 teaspoon baking powder 

1/2 teaspoon baking soda 

60ml Canola cooking oil 

1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

B:

4 egg whites 

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar 

60g sugar 

Methods:

1. Beat egg yolks and sugar until the colour of the mixture changes.
2. Mix in sifted cocoa mixture to avoid lumps. Whisk well. 
3. Mix in cooking oil and vanilla extract. Continue whisking.
4. Mix in sifted flour, baking soda and baking powder. Whisk all ingredients until they are well blended. 
5. Put the bowl aside. Use another bowl to beat the egg whites until bubbles are formed. Mix in cream of tartar. Continue whisking by adding little by little of sugar into the mixture. Whisk until you have formed soft peaks of egg whites mixture. Make sure you do not over beat the egg whites mixture. 
6. Pour half of the egg whites into egg yolks mixture and stir well using cut and turn method using a rubber pad. 
7. Pour in the mixed mixture into the remaining egg whites mixture and stir well using the same method. *It's important that you mix well here or else you will not have a good cake later* 
8. Pour batter into 6-8 inches baking tray to be baked at 160 degrees celcius for 35 minutes. Please study your oven yourself. 

I get this image on Google - this is an illustration of how soft peaks look like.

Frosting

A

400g room temperature cream cheese 

2 - 3 tablespoons of condensed milk 

B

150-200ml whipping cream 

ice water/ice cubes 

1/3 teaspoons of gelatin  

Methods: 

1. Whisk cream cheese until it is slightly melted. 
2. Mix in condensed milk and continue whisking until it turns smooth and soft. 
3. Whisk the whipping cream and gelatin powder with ice water bath method. 
4. Mix whipping cream with the cream cheese mixture gently and evenly.  

Decorations:

Crushed biscuit on the sides of the cake 

Chocolate love letters 

Soda biscuits 

Melted butter 

Method: 

1. Melt the butter with double boiling method. 
2. Place biscuits into a plastic bag. 
3. Crush the biscuits using a rolling pin. 
4. Mix butter and the crushed biscuit until they look like wet sand. 
5. You can use this as the base of the cake OR have them around the sides of the cake like what I did. 

I also used cocoa powder to decorate my cake. Unfortunately, I wasn't patient enough to wait till the cream cheese hardens at the top. It was messed up. This was how it looked like finally - 

If you are curious, what is that three floral things that I wanted to make supposedly - they are actually snow flakes. = = "

I cut these snowflakes myself. I was so excited when I was able to cut them out successfully. Unfortunately, it was all ruined at the end due to my impatience. =( By the way, it was easy to make snowflakes paper art. I believed anybody can do that, as long as you have a pair of hands. 

Ta-dah my cream cheese chocolate chiffon kiwi cake. 

It tasted awesome actually though it didn't look that good. 

Its sweetness was just nice for my family and myself. 

If only I have more decorations to make, I believed my cake will look more appealing. 

Happy merry x'mas anyway. 

Overall making of the cake 

1. Bake the chiffon cake. I used a 9 inches round tray, thus I can only cut my cake into 2 slices. If you use smaller tray, obviously you can have more layers. Chill the cake layers. You cannot apply frosting on warm cakes. 
2. Prepare the frosting. 
3. From bottom counting to the top, this was how I arranged the layers: 

• Chiffon layer 1 -- cream cheese -- crushed mixture biscuits -- cream cheese -- kiwi slices -- cream cheese -- chiffon layer 2 -- overall frosting 

     4.  Decorate your cake with any decoration stuff you have. Fruits, chocolate chips and etc.

     5.  Chill in the fridge for about 1 day for the best taste based on my experience. 

My Point of View

I'm not very experienced in how to bake and frost cakes. Thus, I was very careful in every procedure. In the end, I spent hours in the kitchen just to produce this 9 inches huge cake. I was fooled by the initial recipe which told me to use 9 inches round tray. So, next time, watch out for faulty recipe like this. I was told that 4 eggs recipe are meant to make only 6 inches cake. So, it's something to learn after all. I was dead tired when I finished decorating this cake. I laid flat on the bed and slept for 1-2 hours. It was crazily tiring to bake a cake from scratch especially when you are still an amateur baker. It's good if you can have an assistant by your side to do all the tedious cleaning work. I got so tired all because of the cleaning part. *groan* Anyway, it was overall a great experience. I'm glad that my family enjoyed this cake as much as I do. It tasted really just nice, honestly speaking from a person who aren't too crazy over sweet stuff. I like moderate sweetness and seriously, this cake is just nice. You do not have to reduce any sugar anymore. I used to hate recipes which simply asked you to eat sugar like as though it is free. Just - trust - me, this cake's sweetness is just nice already. Do not reduce anymore, unless you really want a sweet-less cake. 

The sides of the cake do look pretty, isn't it? 

Crushed soda biscuit (brown) mixed with crushed love letters (black-dark brown).

Bon Appetit!