Cocoa Caramel Cake

My niece won first place in the Made By Kids category at the Cake4Kids CakeOff-4Kids event this past weekend!  Under my supervision, she baked, frosted, and decorated both a tasting cake and a show cake (which we ended up serving that night as well).  They were chocolate cakes with a salted caramel buttercream frosting.

Instead of having her use Hershey's cocoa powder in my go to chocolate cake recipe, I supplied her with a "premium" can of Ghirardelli cocoa powder.  It definitely changed this chocolate cake recipe for me.  I don't think I can ever go back to every day grocery store brand now.  (To make matters worse, I recently purchased both E. Guittard and Scharffen Berger cocoa powders to do a comparison in the near future.)

The best part of the night was when I let her decide whether to use coffee or boiling water with this recipe and she replied with the most logical answer, "Kids don't drink coffee!"

The show cake included a base made of candy melts and extra candy melts as "sprinkles" on top.  She piped on the frosting using a 2D tip.  I was trying to teach her to do swirls but her making drop flowers worked out a lot easier.

Not wanting her to deal with hot bubbling sugar, I prepared the salted caramel sauce for her which she simply added about 1/2 cup to my go to vanilla buttercream recipe.  I was afraid of burning the caramel; so, I took it off the heat a lot sooner than necessary; hence, it didn't turn out as amber.  It might explain why the taste was too subtle in the frosting.  So, I let her drizzle the caramel sauce all over the top of the cake and it turned out really good!  People thought the tasting cake was her show cake as well.