Chess Board Cake

This birthday cake took some good advance planning--not so much on the cake side, because it was pretty easy to make and assemble after ordering a couple of chess molds from Amazon for the chess pieces and squares on the board--but more so that I had to learn to play chess. I have never known how, but my husband grew up playing chess and loves the game. He's never been able to play against me, though, so I thought it would be fun to surprise him with a chess board cake and then play against him on the cake--interactive cakes are the best! I was visiting some family the month before with the kids while hubby was home working, and I convinced my 2 teenage nephews to sit down and teach me chess. Goodness those boys were patient with their slow aunt, and helped me through the basics of it, and let me practice on them. I even won one game against them...they may have let me, I'm not sure, but I'll take the win with a proud smile on my face!

The longest part of making this cake is probably taking them time to make all the pieces in the molds with candy melts. It took a lot of chocolate...I think it was almost 32 oz of white and 32 oz of dark chocolate. One those were all done all I had to do was bake and frost a 12" cake in some dark chocolate ganache and then put all my little squares on one by one. If you are wanting to go the extra mile, you could always bake the inside of the cake to resemble a chess board (I have one of those kinds of cake to show you coming up on my blog), but I only wanted my board to be 2" high so it looked like a real board. 

 When hubby got home from work on his birthday he was both totally surprised by his cake and that I actually knew how to play the game. He sat down at once to play me...I put up a good fight, but in the end as you can see, it was checkmate on me (I don't even know--is that the right way to say it? I still have a lot to learn). I guess it was good that the birthday boy won. We'll just pretend that I let him win, right?!

 My kids wanted in on the fun too, so we also made checkers pieces out of molds we got from Amazon and let them play a few rounds of checkers. Man they are competitive...they get that from me ;)

After several rounds of chess and checkers, we all got our just desserts, and got to eat our game. It was quite satisfying if I say so myself!