Cake Dreaming: Food Friday

We're ending a busy week, what with my oldest going to high school for the first time, and the homeschooling group my youngest and I attend having it's first day today, along with the first session where I'm facilitating a cool experiment testing for ESP. I'm fried, and jonesing for some sweets. Specifically for cake. I thought about making this one again:


But after seeing these cute cakes baked into ice cream cones and this vividly dyed rainbow cake in a jar, a regularly shaped cake just isn't interesting enough, no matter how chocolatey delicious it is.

There appears to be one problem with both the jar and cone approaches: they have an unfavorable cake-to-frosting ratio. An outrage! But - fixable. One approach that could work is to do a filling, perhaps a custard-type one, or pastry creme. Then again, blasting the center with a boatload of swiss buttercream would be pretty awesome too. Or maybe whipped ganache…

So, that's what I'm going to experiment with this weekend. I'll be using a gluten cake free mix from XO that I recently discovered and LOVE. For the cone cakes, there are gluten-free sugar cones instead of the wafer style made with wheat. For the jar versions, I'm going to try using tiny 4 oz. jars, and bake/steam them in the slow cooker to see if I can get the colors to stay super vivid instead of browning a lot. Hoping for a glass-shard-free version of those!

Results to come, I'll share the good, bad and ugly when done.