Celestial Chocolate Birthday Cake--A Sequence

This is some serious chocolate cake.  SaySay picked it out of a cookbook called Southern Cakes by Nancie McDermott.  I tried to get her to let me make the Caramel Cake, but she insisted on the Helen Hudson Whiting's Celestial Chocolate Cake. Three layers with whipped cream filling and heavy duty chocolate icing.  The whole thing has 4 sticks of butter, 1 1/2 cups heavy cream and an ungodly amount of chocolate cocoa and sugar.  Of course, we had to taste it every few minutes. 

This is the first time they've helped make a cake from scratch.  I finally got to use my Kitchenaid Mixer again.  I've had it for 20 years and probably only used it 5 or 6 times. 

 We're not cutting it until tomorrow when Momma and Daddy come over so it sits in the refrigerator for now.  It is so warm here, I was scared it would go bad if we left it out on the counter overnight.  Not to mention the unmentionable ant problem!  Anything left on the counter is carted off in the middle of the night to the ant hill.

 

 It's pretty tall.

We'll take pictures tomorrow when it has candles on it!

So we get it out the fridge in the am and it had a crack in the top center that we quickly filled with icing.  I think what happened was the sides sagged a little because the center had baked higher on each layer and I had propped it up by using the white filling.  The white filling settled, the sides pressed down and the top center split.  But, hey, the more icing, the better.