Chocolate-Raspberry Cake, version two.

Valentine's Cake two is another take on Chocolate Raspberry Cake, which I made once before, here.

It's a similar cake, except the chocolate cake recipe I used is the one from Baked which I posted for the Sweet and Salty Cake. I used Martha's Dark Chocolate Frosting again, which I'm realizing is a real favorite. I love that it used chocolate and powdered sugar and cocoa powder and butter. It's like the best of all the frostings combined. This time, I used 1 pound semi-sweet chocolate, and half pound dark. I used salted butter and omitted the salt in the recipe, and boy howdy, the results were fab. Smooth and dreamy.

I froze my layers before I used them, which made assembly like, 20 times easier. The layers aren't as fragile and the chocolate frosting hardens in place (so no sliding!).

I spread a thin layer of frosting on the first two layers, then spread a thin layer of Smucker's seedless raspberry jam on top of the frosting.

I assembled the cake, applied the crumb coat and let it set.

When spreading the finale layer of frosting I made it as smooth as possible because I wanted to be able to focus on decorating. We cut our cakes into 12 slices at the restaurant, so made some marks dividing each slice and piped a looping vine of chocolate around the perimeter and side of the cake.

I mixed 1/3 cup melted white chocolate with a tablespoon seedless raspberry jam and piped it onto the cake in pretty pink hearts. Every slice gets a heart!

I think it's ADORABLE. My personal Valentine to the chocolate loving patrons of the Restaurant.