I've told the
story to many a friend about how I appointed myself the birthday cake baker a few months into my first job out of
college. When I made the decision, there were only nine investment bankers in our group. Nine cakes a year?
Piece of, umm, an exhibit in an offering memorandum. No problem.
But soon our group was 27 strong and I was baking all the time, getting requests for special desserts, and generally kicking myself for stepping up. What should I do when my own birthday approached? I sucked it up and ate the cardboard-tasting grocery store cake that was the reason I'd decided to start baking for my co-workers in the first place.
Like Kelli, I'd much rather make my own birthday cake (and have, many a year). She fixed herself a delicious-sounding concoction of chocolate, hazelnut, ganache, genoise, mocha filling... yum. She provides general instructions, along with some links to recipes, if you'd like to recreate it for your own special day.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-24-2006 @ 9:51AM
B said...
My sister, while in medical school, baked the cake for her "suprise" birthday party one year.
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1-24-2006 @ 10:54AM
Nicole said...
I, too, usually end up the defacto cake maker (usually cheesecake) at jobs. However, I draw the line at making my own cake. I will eat crappy, dry cookies before I make my own.
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1-24-2006 @ 11:31AM
Faith said...
I love making my own birthday cake, and just did! It gives me a good excuse to mess around with more elaborate recipes and to experiment with new methods that seem too dramatic for everyday desserts.
This year I did a riff on a Black Forest cake, with a fudgy chocolate cherry torte as base, then alternating layers of Pierre Herme's hazelnut meringue, ganache, kirsch cherry compote, chocolate meringue disks, toasted almonds, and cream whipped with cream cheese.
Yeah, it was over the top. But as decadent as it sounds, it was lighter than I expected: I hardly sweetened the cream at all, and the meringues softened with all the cream and chocolate to almost melt in the mouth.
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1-24-2006 @ 12:20PM
Betsy Block said...
Sarah -
Yeah, stepping up is often problematic for exactly the reason you cite. The older I get, the more imbecilic I try to seem. It's working -- for better or worse.
I'm happy to have found you. Thanks!
Betsy
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1-24-2006 @ 1:09PM
Liz said...
If I don't make my own birthday cake, no one else will. Why should I either have a cheap cake I won't enjoy (on my birthday, no less!) or shell out money I can't afford for a fancy pastry shop cake when I can make a perfect nice one myself?
I find no shame in it.
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1-24-2006 @ 3:45PM
Huffy said...
And I just made my own as well, Faith (you're another January baby, I take it?), however, your efforts were much more ambitious and adult! Of late, I've had a real peanut butter and chocolate jones going, so I went with that combo as a springboard. The resulting product was truly delicious: deep, dark, moist-but-not-heavy cake layers, filled and frosted with a cream cheese peanut butter icing to which I added a couple big pinches of King Arthur Flour's Black Cocoa Powder (a little goes a mighty long way). I over-gilded the lily by sprinkling chopped, roasted peanuts on top. Fun to prepare, even more fun to eat.
Huffy
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1-24-2006 @ 4:57PM
Shawn Lea said...
But there is something about eating a cake you bake for yourself. It just doesn't taste as good. Maybe it's all mental, but I don't think so. My solution has always been to find the best (and usually most expensive) baker in town and buy a cake just for me. (After all, we can bank all those dollars we saved making everyone else's cakes!) ;)
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