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Brooklyn Blackout Cake

I was in the mood for a fancy cake and decided on the Brooklyn blackout cake. This recipe from King Arthur Flour gives you the basic idea as well as the history. The cake combines a chocolate cake, chocolate pudding in between the layers, chocolate icing, and cake crumbs embedded in the icing around the sides. I decided to put together the cake based on recipes from several sources.
The cake is Rose Levy Berenbaum's devil's food cake. I chose this not only because it tastes great but also because the recipe gave me three layers, giving room for more pudding.
I made the pudding based on the recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, including a healthy dose of cream along with the milk.
The icing came from Rose Levy Berenbaum's chocolate buttercream recipe. I hadn't made this before and it is surprisingly simple: milk chocolate, a little dark chocolate, and butter. No eggs, no corn syrup.
The crumbs come from the cake domes---they turned out to be plentiful.
A trimmed layer went down, then a layer of pudding.
The full assembly was iced.
Then the crumbs were applied by hand.
The result was spectacular and tasted great. Pudding, particularly a rich pudding, gives a distinctive taste and texture that is very different from an icing filling.
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