Melody's Triple Chocolate Layer Cake

A cake worth singing about!

One of my early goals when I started this blog was to make human sized replicas of various food items that showed up in the AG character's collections. I've been a little inconsistent in making that happen over the years, but decided to take on an interesting challenge (for me) to kick off the new year. 

I'm very excited to present to you with my version of Melody's birthday cake! Read on to see how I tried to bring this model cake to life.

Melody's birthday cake is mentioned very briefly in Never Stop Singing: A Classic Featuring Melody, the second book in Melody's series. As a friendly reminder, starting in 2014, all historical - now BeForever, although that's maybe changing back to historical - characters only have two books in their collection, but they're the equivalent of three books condensed into one. They roughly cover what would have been in books 1-3 and 4-6 in a traditional six book set. 

Melody was born on New Year's Day, and she loves that her birthday helps symbolize the start to a new year. She's also excited because "Her mother's triple chocolate layer cakes were so good that Melody couldn't imagine celebrating anything special without one." 

That's about all the description the cake gets in the book, and although Melody's collection upon release catered very closely to what appeared in her stories, the cake wasn't originally included. A set called "Melody's Birthday Party Accessories" was released in 2017 and features a two layer chocolate cake decorated to look like a record, with musical notes and "Lift Every Voice and Sing" written on it. "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" has also been called the Black National Anthem and has been an extremely significant piece for Black Americans since its creation as a poem in 1900. Melody sings it at her church in her first book after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, where four choir girls were killed. As the song is so personally significant to the character, and considering her love of music, the design definitely works for a cake honoring her tenth birthday and reminded me of the very thematic birthday cakes my mom would make for my siblings and I on our birthdays. 

As a note, it looks like this set has already been retired, maybe because they seem to be discontinuing Melody's table and chairs set, and this definitely was designed to pair with that. I'm holding out hope that all these historical retirements are because the line is going to get a nice shiny refresh with lots of cool new sets instead of a sign that each character is going to have a significantly smaller collection than they used to.

Off the bat, I want to make it clear that the cake recipe I made for the base is not a historical one, mostly out of laziness. There's nothing really different or exciting about a chocolate cake recipe from 1964 - although Melody's mom has likely been making this recipe since the 40's or 50's - and one from 2019. Chocolate cake's history is the topic for another post, although I'll hint at one thing: at one time, "chocolate cake" usually meant a white or yellow cake frosted in chocolate frosting! 

The book doesn't explain what makes Melody's mom's recipe a triple chocolate cake, and there are a couple ways to interpret that name. Double chocolate usually just means both the cake and the frosting are chocolate flavored, while triple chocolate can mean it has three layers, or it uses three separate kinds of chocolate, whether that be a pudding filling, crushed chocolate wafers as a crumb coating, or tempered chocolate decorations. The model cake clearly only has two layers, so adding a third is definitely out - and not feasible for me, as I don't have three cake pans of the same size - which left me wondering how to add my third chocolate element for a more accurate cake. 

Enter Sally's Baking Addiction and her recipe for triple chocolate layer cake. Sally's Baking Addiction is a blog my wife is particularly fond of, and she's made several of her recipes to rave reviews, and so I was happy to give this one a spin. The trick to making this triple chocolate is her suggestion of decorating with chocolate chips, which gave me the idea of just adding them directly into the batter as you would with a chocolate muffin. That let me preserve the look of the doll sized cake while still getting three different chocolate elements in the finished product. 

To start off, mix together your dry ingredients. I put 1 and 3/4 cups of flour, 1 and 3/4 cup of sugar, 3/4 cup cocoa powder (which she reminds readers shouldn't be dutch processed), 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 2 teaspoons of baking soda, and 1 teaspoon salt in one medium sized bowl. To my second bowl, I mixed together 1 cup of buttermilk, 1/2 of a cup of canola oil, 2 large eggs, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract with a hand mixer. I would have used our lovely new stand mixer, but Jess was making home made bagels, so I had to do it the old fashioned way. 

I slowly combined my dry and wet ingredients and got a really thick, very dark batter.

Next, I added 1 cup of freshly brewed, very strong coffee as instructed, which Sally warns you will make your batter very liquidy. She assures you that this is okay! Once everything is mixed together, divide the batter between two round cake pans that have been greased and floured. The original recipe says this should be done in 9 inch round cake pans, which would probably have been helpful with the decorating, but I only have one 9 inch cake pan, and I have two 8 inch. This is still okay, but it does mean you need to leave the cakes to cook in the oven longer because you've got more batter in a smaller space and it'll take longer to heat up the center of your cakes. 

At this point, I realized I had forgotten to add in the chocolate chips and hastily added them to both of my pans, knowing this was potentially a bad idea and could mean they would sink to the bottom. What can I say? I like to live dangerously apparently.

I put them in at 350 degrees for about 35 minutes before they seemed cooked through. The original recipe says between 23-27 minutes should be enough for nine inch pans. They looked pretty good coming out of the oven! 

I did have one layer with some tearing because of the chocolate chips that did, in fact, sink to the bottom of the pan, but it was totally salvageable and the other came out perfectly clean. Funny how that happens. I left them to cool down completely before moving on to the frosting.

Sally offers a pretty simple buttercream recipe that I promptly forgot to take any in progress pictures of while I was making it: 2.5 sticks of room temperature get thoroughly creamed before adding in about 3 or 4 cups of powdered sugar and 3/4 of a cup of cocoa powder. Once that's combined, add somewhere between 3-5 tablespoons of heavy cream, 1 teaspoon of vanilla and a pinch of salt to taste. It creates a nice, light brown frosting that's a good contrast to the cake and makes more than enough to give it a very healthy layer of frosting. 

Now, confession: I tend to shy away from decorating cakes. It's not that I don't like frosting, although sometimes I do genuinely prefer unfrosted cake, or even that I find it tedious or anything, it's just something I'm not very practiced at, so I worry it'll come out looking terrible. I also will admit I think it's a lots of work for little payoff situation sometimes, because you can spend hours putting flowers on a cake only to have it devoured in minutes. Not to mention the effort it takes to make different kinds of frosting or decorative pieces! But I was determined to do my best to make this as close to accurate as possible, so I rolled up my sleeves and gave it a shot. 

To help me along in this process, I did buy some tubes of decorator frosting from the grocery store so at least I wouldn't have to make a separate batch of icing. We had used this brand for our Rock Fact cookies at our Over the Garden Wall party, and Jess and I both liked how easy they were to use with the piping tips, and it tastes pretty good, too. 

To start off, I made a circle in the middle of the cake with white decorator icing and then used a fork to score the top of the cake like the grooves on a record.

And after that, I was like a woman possessed. We were also admittedly on a bit of a time crunch to go to our friend Jenna's house for a post holiday party, and I really should have made the cake the night before, so I was feeling the pressure to finish it on time. Once I got into the groove of making the musical notes, I felt totally in the zone and piped out one after the other. They all came out looking really cool! Although technically my cake has one note less than Melody's doll sized version because the width of the cake just didn't lend itself to fitting all of them in. If I had made them in a 9 inch pan, I probably would have had room. 

The text was difficult, and had to be done in black icing because the brand we were using didn't have brown available at our store. Melody's doll sized cake has each word written in capital and lowercase letters, and stamped out perfectly like it was printed on a computer... because, you know, it was. It's not a terrible aesthetic choice for the doll sized cake, but it does make it feel a little more inauthentic than say, Molly's birthday cake, which has swirls in the frosting to make it look like it really was put on by hand. I was joking with Jess that either Mrs. Ellison is a secret professional cake baker or just generally has way better fine motor skills than I do, because there was no way I was going to be able to replicate the font or even make things lowercase. 

Anyway, I did manage to avoid the John Mulaney problem of going too big too fast and running out of room, so that was exciting. And hey! I'm actually genuinely really, really proud of how it came out. It's not perfect, but the resemblance to the doll sized version is definitely pretty good, don't you think?

It was at this point that I realized I had volunteered to take my beautiful creation on the metro to Jenna's house, and briefly panicked that there wouldn't be a good way to get it there without totally squishing the frosting. Fortunately, we had a Tupperware container that was just tall enough to protect the frosting without crushing it, and so between that and some cling wrap, the cake was ready to be sampled by my wife and grad school friends at our post Christmas get together. 

I was really excited to cut into it and compare the slices. Melody's cake has two removable pieces, which also don't look like the most realistic cake slices AG has ever produced, but are cute and at least something dolls can share with each other. Remember Samantha's BeForever collection and how all her food sets were basically "tea for one?" Not exactly a lot of play opportunity there. 

Every time I do a frosted layer cake, I worry that I won't have enough frosting to cover the full cake plus the middle layer, so I usually under fill the middle and end up with an excess on the outside. I really thought this would be what happened with this cake and was complaining about it to Jess on the way to Jenna's, but lo and behold, there was actually a nice thick layer of frosting waiting for us on the inside!

I specifically cut the cake to try and get the slice looking just like the doll sized version, and again think it came out looking pretty darn close to perfect. My cake is a fair bit darker than Melody's is, but frankly the doll version is a pretty pale looking chocolate cake. I like my cakes dark and rich looking!

And it was definitely rich. This was a very tasty cake, and if it's anything like the one Mrs. Ellison makes, I can definitely see why Melody can't imagine celebrating anything without it. It was super moist, very chocolatey, and I think I managed to get a good ratio of frosting to cake. The texture was really nice, too, with a good sort of spring to it. The chocolate chips weren't super noticeable to me and honestly I'm not sure if you would have known they were in there if I hadn't said so, but I'm also glad it wasn't like biting into a marble baked into the cake, which is kind of what it sounded like it would be like if you decorated with them the way Sally suggested. Sorry Sally, but most of the people I told about the cake agreed that the decorating tip might have been a little heavy on the chips. 

My cake made more than enough to feed five people, and will be making an appearance in the office kitchen in hopes my coworkers can help us finish it off. Just like every recipe I've sampled from Sally's Baking Addiction, it was easy to follow and produced a really nice result. I'd definitely make this again. 

Will this kickstart a new desire to dive into the world of cake decorating? Who knows. I fully acknowledge that my method for making this cake involved a mild amount of cheating, but I did have fun making it and I'm really, really pleased with the finished product. By looks alone, this is one of my favorite things I've ever made for the blog and am really happy I decided to give it a shot. Ever since I was a little kid, the miniature food sets were my favorite parts of American Girl's offerings, and getting to bring this one to life was a lot of fun. I hope you had a good time reading about it too!

Now to think about which one to make next!