I was tooling around the internet looking for a recipe to use up some extra buttermilk I had in the fridge when I came across a recipe for "Peanut Butter Parcels" on the King Arthur Flour website. The recipe is supposed to be a homemade version of a Drake's Funny Bones, a devil's food cake with peanut butter creme filling and chocolate frosting. I have never tasted a Drake's cake of any sort -- growing up in Nebraska, my snack cake of choice was the Dolly Madison vanilla Zinger. Thus, I have no idea what a Funny Bones is supposed to taste like. But the recipe looked promising, so I figured it was worth a try.
You bake the chocolate cake component (butter, sugar, vanilla, eggs, cocoa powder, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and buttermilk) in a 9-inch by 13-inch pan. The cake is moist but quite firm, such that you can split it into two layers without much of a problem. Then you spread a peanut butter filling (made from creamy peanut butter, powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla) in between the cake layers. I froze the filled cake for about half an hour to help the cake and filling set up a bit, and then I trimmed off the edges of the cake and cut the remainder into 27 rectangular bars.
Covering these cakes in the chocolate coating was a huge pain, requiring a lot of time and creating quite a mess. The recipe indicates that if you want to coat the bottom of the cakes (as well as the top and sides), you will need an extra half batch of coating. So I made a batch and a half of coating, intending to coat cakes all the way around. The recipe instructs you to pour coating over the tops of the cakes and then spread it over the sides. Instead, I took each cake one at a time and used an offset spatula to frost the top and sides, placing the frosted cakes on a wire rack to allow the excess coating to drip off. These cakes were absolutely hideous after I applied the coating. They looked a lot like the cakes pictured alongside the recipe on the King Arthur website, with a raggedly and uneven texture. Also, the cake contained some large air bubbles, and these created visible craters in the coating.
I discovered that if I waited until the chocolate coating set up and then went back to apply another layer, I could smooth out the coating a bit and achieve a marginally better looking product. In the end, I covered the cakes with a several coats of chocolate, ultimately requiring two and a half batches of chocolate coating (and I didn't even get to coat the bottoms!). In the future, I would plan to make three batches of coating to make sure I have enough for several layers.
The coating set up nicely and held up well, even during the little spring heat wave we've been experiencing here in D.C. I'm very glad I added so much chocolate coating, because even though the final product was still messy looking and unattractive (see the picture above), these little cakes were freakin' delicious. The creamy peanut butter filling was fabulous with the chocolate cake, and the frosting was my favorite part! It had a nice firm texture and added a lot of flavor to the cake. As you can see from the cross section below, the outer coating was quite thick. (The cake in the picture is lopsided because I lost a bit of cake off the bottom during all of the handling to apply the multiple layers of chocolate coating.)
Usually I'm completely superficial when it comes to baked goods and don't like making anything that isn't beautiful and picture perfect, but I would make these ugly cakes again any time. (And I think I could improve my coating technique with a little more practice.) Besides being delicious, the whimsy of the snack cake format made these extra fun. I still don't know if these parcels taste anything like a Funny Bones, but I don't really care if they do or not -- aside from being an eyesore, I think these cakes are just perfect!
Recipe: "Peanut Butter Parcels" from King Arthur Flour.
You bake the chocolate cake component (butter, sugar, vanilla, eggs, cocoa powder, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and buttermilk) in a 9-inch by 13-inch pan. The cake is moist but quite firm, such that you can split it into two layers without much of a problem. Then you spread a peanut butter filling (made from creamy peanut butter, powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla) in between the cake layers. I froze the filled cake for about half an hour to help the cake and filling set up a bit, and then I trimmed off the edges of the cake and cut the remainder into 27 rectangular bars.
Covering these cakes in the chocolate coating was a huge pain, requiring a lot of time and creating quite a mess. The recipe indicates that if you want to coat the bottom of the cakes (as well as the top and sides), you will need an extra half batch of coating. So I made a batch and a half of coating, intending to coat cakes all the way around. The recipe instructs you to pour coating over the tops of the cakes and then spread it over the sides. Instead, I took each cake one at a time and used an offset spatula to frost the top and sides, placing the frosted cakes on a wire rack to allow the excess coating to drip off. These cakes were absolutely hideous after I applied the coating. They looked a lot like the cakes pictured alongside the recipe on the King Arthur website, with a raggedly and uneven texture. Also, the cake contained some large air bubbles, and these created visible craters in the coating.
I discovered that if I waited until the chocolate coating set up and then went back to apply another layer, I could smooth out the coating a bit and achieve a marginally better looking product. In the end, I covered the cakes with a several coats of chocolate, ultimately requiring two and a half batches of chocolate coating (and I didn't even get to coat the bottoms!). In the future, I would plan to make three batches of coating to make sure I have enough for several layers.
Recipe: "Peanut Butter Parcels" from King Arthur Flour.
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