I’ve been trying to write this post about this Devil’s Food Cake with Black Pepper Buttercream for three days now but seem to be experiencing writer’s block, so in an attempt to get something down on the page so that I can share it with you in time for Valentine’s Day (because nothing is more appropriate than chocolate cake on Valentine’s Day), I give you the following Reasons You Should Make This Cake:
1) It has not one but two kinds of frosting: Swiss meringue buttercream filling laced with vanilla and cracked black pepper (yes, pepper), and the most divine whipped chocolate fudge frosting on the outside. Black pepper might sound like an odd thing to pair with classic chocolate and vanilla, but it’s not odd – it’s very, very good.
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The building where I work has a really nice high performance gym, and I’m lucky to have a flexible-enough work schedule so that I can work out there three mornings a week. However, along with warm-up, cool-down, showering, and making myself look presentably professional for work, this only leaves about twenty to thirty minutes for actual exercise, so to get the most bang for my buck I usually end up doing some combination of lifting moderately heavy things at a high intensity (aka “
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And so, finally, here is the wedding cake I made for my friends Sam and Whittney. This is the second wedding cake I’ve made now, and somehow both of them have required me to transport all of the necessary components and equipment via ferry and cooler to Vancouver and assemble them in someone else’s kitchen in the middle of the summer heat. It just adds to the challenge, right? 😉
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For the July Daring Baker’s Challenge, Ruth from 
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I’m going to be perfectly honest here: I don’t really get what all the fuss is about with red velvet cake. In fact, most of the time, I tend to agree with the guy who said, “
Last weekend our friends Sam and Whittney tied the knot (for those who are trying to follow along here, Sam is my friend Lynette’s brother. He is also Nate’s good friend, which is how Nate and I met). We were fairly involved in the wedding – Nate was the best man and I made the wedding cake (more to come on that, I promise!) – which for me included Whittney’s stagette weekend. Whittney and Sam live just up the road from us in Shawnigan Lake in a house with lots of extra bedrooms, so the stagette was basically a big girls’ sleep-over at their house with lots of drinking and eating (Sam spent the weekend at my house with Nate).
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I don’t have a step-by-step recipe post for you today, but I wanted to share this anyway. I just finished taking 
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