Birthday Cake

I made this cake for my mom’s birthday this past August.  It took me a grand total of 6 hours to bake. It is comprised of three 9-inch devil’s food cakes, which as it turns out are not easy cakes to bake. As they say, “the devil is in the details,” and clearly that is where the devil in devil’s food cake comes in, because it is the most detailed cake recipe I have ever followed. After close to an hour preparing the batter (melting chocolate, frothing egg yokes and whipping egg whites to soft peaks by hand are just some of the highlights), the cake bakes for close to an hour and then have to cool for a full hour before it will come out of the pans (which have to be properly prepared beforehand, of course). By the time I turned out the cakes onto the cooling racks, it was close to 2 in the morning. After a short sleep, I got up at 7:30 so that I could have the cake finished before my mom woke up. Unfortunately I didn’t anticipate another 3 hours of work, so my mom was up well before I finished, but I digress. To dress the cake (so to speak) I first sliced each of the 3 cakes in half. I then imbibed the bottom halves of each of the cakes with black raspberry liquor. I didn’t drown the cake in the liquor, but I was certainly liberal with it, because it is a very strongly flavored cake it overpowers the liquor unless you use quite a bit. Then I went about making a dark chocolate ganache filling for the cakes (I will post the ganache recipe next time I make truffles.) I filled each cake with the ganache and put all the halves back together. Then came the fun part, buttercream. I made a triple batch of the vanilla buttercream. I didn’t dye it because I thought the white contrasted so well with the deep brown chocolate cake, plus I had planned on decorating the top. I iced what became the bottom layer, then put the middle layer on top of it, and iced that. Finally I placed the top layer on and covered it with icing and filled in any spots on the sides that I missed earlier. I had every intention of decorating the cake with purple and pink flowers (I just got a new pastry bag I’ve been itching to try out) but it was so late by then and the cake looked so amazing (not to mention it would have meant making another batch of icing) that I let it be.

And let me just say that it was worth those six hours! It is honestly the best cake I have ever eaten, if I do say so myself! Yes, I know it is rather presumptuous to declare a cake I have baked to be the best cake I have ever eaten, but it is the truth. The cake itself was moist, rich and sinfully chocolaty. The imbibing added a subtle taste of black raspberry and vanilla. The ganache made it all the more sinfully chocolaty. And the icing was fluffy and thick and sweet and, most importantly, buttery. It is impossible to have just one slice. Perhaps that is another reason why it is called devil’s food cake, because it is evilly addictive and quite fattening (but who cares about fattening, it is a birthday cake and calories don’t count on your birthday, right?)