Happy Birthday to ME! (or How I Made My Own Birthday Cake)
Well, as it happens every year, today is my birthday! Yay, me! Today I'm 41, and still healthy, happy, and I feel really good about life.
Since I've been taking an intro cake decorating class over the past few weeks, I thought it would be fun to make my own cake for my birthday. And appropriate to early March, I decided to make a spring cherry blossom cake.
I made a white cake and tinted it blue. I thought it would look great to slice into a light green cake and see the blue inside. Kind of like seeing the sky against grass. I made a 9" cake in a 3" deep pan. I torted it into two layers.
Here I've made a double layer of dam with stiff frosting to put my filling inside the cake. Oh, did I say filling?
What's this, you ask? Heaven in a bowl!
It's going to become whipped chocolate ganache for my filling. Yummmmm!
I took one cup of heavy whipping cream and heated just until boiling. Then I poured it into a bowl containing 4 oz of chopped up semisweet chocolate. I gently mixed it all until the chocolate was melted completely in the cream. Then I chilled it overnight. You can make this up to 4 days before whipping. Don't whip it until just before you need it!
Here's what it all looks like after spending some quality time with my KitchenAid mixer. Like I said, heaven in a bowl.
Put the chocolate ganache into the middle of the cake and spread out evenly.
Until it looks something like this.
Then I took the other layer and gently set it on top of it all.
I used an electric green gel to tint my frosting.
Here is my white spatula with the green frosting in the background.
I used an icing bag and tip 789 to frost the cake. I'm still learning how to use it!
Crumb coated. Not perfectly smooth, but it doesn't need to be at this point.
I played around a little with spraying the frosting with water on top to get a really smooth surface. It works nicely! But again, this was just a first coat. It ended the day in the fridge to rest.
Next day- my birthday! More pale green frosting added for the second coat.
I made these petite pink flowers a few days ago. So perfect for this kind of cake!
Bigger dark pink flowers, also made a few days ago. Making flowers in advance makes it really easy to decorate a cake!
More experimenting with techniques. This is called the paper towel method to help smooth out the frosting. You can end up with some neat patterns if that's what you're looking for.
I smoothed out the sides and top with parchment paper. I ran out of time, so I wasn't able to get the frosting as smooth as I wanted it. Still, it looked good, considering that it was my very first time making a cake with smooth buttercream frosting!
I take a lot of joy in knowing that the cake enjoyed with my family tonight was a gift from me to them.
And there's something really cool about writing "happy birthday to ME!" on a cake.
After all, birthdays are the only time when you can truly say that "It's all about ME!" and no one thinks you're being bitchy.
Hope you enjoyed seeing my cake!
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