Italian Love Cake

We don't do much for Valentine's Day, especially when it lands on a Tuesday night, but I thought it was a fine excuse to try out a new cake recipe! I saw this Italian Love Cake recipe on Pinterest and thought it'd be something cool to try.

I totally forgot the cake mix when I wrote down the necessary ingredients and had to run out to get that this morning. Ugh. (I have a cold so the last thing I felt like doing today was going out, but I really wanted to make this cake for tonight.) After running to the store, Dakota and I got to work.

Dakota got to do all the pouring and mixing while I did the measuring and egg cracking. I cracked four at once when I knocked the carton off the counter...fun times! Good thing we'd just been to Costco and I had more!

After mixing the cake portion we had to mix up the second layer ingredients. It calls for 2 POUNDS of ricotta cheese. 2 POUNDS. That's a lot of ricotta! Also, the cake mix used three eggs and the second (cheese) layer called for 4 more eggs. That's a bunch of eggs! 

Once the two layers were thoroughly mixed we poured the cake mix layer into our 9x13 pan, then added the cheese layer on top. The recipe says to smooth the cheese layer on top of the chocolate layer but that was next to impossible and ours was more of a swirl than two separate layers.

While the cake was baking Dakota and I set our table for a special Valentine dinner. She loves making place cards for the dinner table so I drew some hearts and then she cut them out, wrote names on them, added some stickers and taped them to the chairs. 

The cake finished baking about 2 minutes before it was time to take Dakota to school so we pulled it out of the oven and took off. I let it cool for a little over an hour before mixing up the topping which consisted of cool whip (which I only got 8 oz. not the 16 it called for, oops) chocolate pudding and milk. 

Despite the lack of cool whip and the fact that I put the topping on before it was completely cooled, it turned out really good! Harper, Tony and I liked it anyways. Landon couldn't get over the textures (the cake was cake-y while the cheese layer was firm and the top layer creamy) and Dakota wouldn't try it because she had her heart set on some of the Valentine candy she came home from school with. Tony is taking the rest of the cake to work tomorrow so that it won't go to waste. 

Happy Valentine's Day!