Tag Archives: baking your own birthday cake

Blackberry and Lemon Stripe Cake and Happy Birthdays

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Each year, my birthday gift to myself is to spend the day creating an elaborate, multi-step cake. In 2019 it was this showstopper, in 2018 I spent all day creating this stunner, in 2017 I baked this beauty and in 2016, this was my featured cake.

Baking is my happy place and I love to challenge myself with advanced techniques to create something I have never done before. This vertical stripe cake has been on my list of “must bake” for quite a while now. Cutting into a cake and revealing vertical layers of cake and icing, instead of the usual horizontal, is such an unexpected delight and surprise. There are so few good surprises left in life anymore.

This cake is inspired by the Lemon and Blackcurrant Stripe Cake in Sweet. I could not find black currants, so I used blackberries instead. The berries are used to make a sauce to flavour the buttercream. In the original recipe, they used some of the sauce to create a “drip cake”, but I have never been successful in getting the sauce to drip artistically down the sides. I always make a bloody mess. I decided to just top it with some berries and flowers and use the extra sauce to serve on the side.

The batter for the cake is a light lemon sponge. It’s baked in a jellyroll pan.

Once the cake is baked, let it cool for 5 minutes. Then dust with icing sugar, and cover with a clean towel. Flip the whole thing over, peel off the baking sheet and parchment paper and roll up the warm cake in the towel.

This step “trains” the cake to roll up later without cracking. Once cooled, unroll and cut into three long rectangles.

Spread each rectangle with some of the buttercream. The original recipe called for a French buttercream. This type of buttercream uses egg yolks. I find it a bit too rich for this cake, so I went with a Swiss Meringue Buttercream, which uses just the egg whites.

The three strips of cake are rolled up into one wide barrel. Stand it on its end and you have a vertical stripe cake. You can see in the photo below, where the strips have been joined. Then cover the entire cake in more buttercream.

I created a simple decoration of flowers and blackberries.

Click here to print recipe for Blackberry-and-Lemon-Stripe-CakeDownload

Banana Crunch Cake

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I have never really loved my birthday. It’s not an aversion to aging, I’m perfectly fine with that. I just dislike having any attention focused on me. I especially hate having “Happy Birthday” sung to me. All three of my children also really dislike having it sung to them. We’re a family of silent cake eaters, except for my husband, who enjoys a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday, so we indulge him on his birthday.

I decided that it’s really sad to dislike your birthday, so a few years ago I decided to focus on embracing the day by spending it doing something I really love. I began baking my own birthday cake. Some might think it’s pitiful to have to bake your own cake, but this way, I get exactly what I want.

I usually spend several days researching and thinking about what kind of cake I want to create. These are not simple cakes. The first birthday cake I made for myself was “Pam’s Carrot Cake.” Subsequent years brought more complex cakes. There was the epic Brown Butter Salted Caramel Crunch Cake of 2016 and legendary (in our family, at least) Caramel Honeycomb Birthday Cake of 2017.

The crunch in this cake comes from toffee. I made my own toffee from sugar, corn syrup, cream and butter. If you’re pressed for time, you could substitute Skor bits, but making my own was part of my birthday therapy.



The banana cake in this recipe is not a light and fluffy sponge. It’s dense and super moist thanks to ripe bananas and sour cream. My frosting of choice was a Milk Chocolate Swiss Meringue Buttercream. If you have never made a meringue based buttercream, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. It is less sweet than a typical American buttercream, which is made from icing sugar and butter. If you’re curious to learn more, this is an excellent primer on the various types of buttercream.

I made the toffee crunch, buttercream and cake layers the day before my birthday, and spent most of my birthday assembling, styling, videoing and photographing the assembly. In short, a glorious day of creative fulfillment.

I piped the buttercream on in gentle waves, using a leaf tip (Wilton #104). I have been excited to try this technique ever since I first saw it in Tessa Huff’s glorious new book, “Icing on the Cake.”

https://youtu.be/6ojFyG9dS_g
Click here to print recipe for Banana Crunch Cake with Milk Chocolate Buttercream


Caramel Honeycomb Birthday Cake

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make a wishRegular readers of this blog know that I bake my own birthday cake every year. My girlfriend Paula learned this the hard way. I am still apologizing to her for my rudeness!

My birthday cakes are usually multi-recipe, all day baking extravaganzas. It’s my birthday present to myself. I get exactly what I want and I get to spend time alone, baking in my kitchen, my happy place3 slices of cakeThis year’s cake was inspired by a trip to Charleston South Carolina we took with our friends The Grizzlies. One of the highlights of our weekend was a cooking class with Chef Vinson Petrillo at The Zero George Hotel, a charming 16 room boutique hotel. Chef Vinson is a recent transplant to the Charleston area. Originally from New Jersey, he honed his craft in New York. When I asked him what brought him to Charleston, he replied simply, “My wife wanted kids.” Chef PetrilloThey are now the proud and very busy parents of two little ones, aged 1 and 2. As I observed Chef Vincent during our 3-hour class it became obvious to me that he must be an excellent dad. He handled all our questions and comments with great patience and equanimity!

For the first course, he cooked butternut squash by the sous vide technique. He followed that up by sauteeing it in brown butter and finally topped it with torched marshmallow. Sort of a glorified sweet potato casserole but so much better.

For the main course, he prepared sauteed snapper. Watching him cook and plate the food was just a joy. His passion for and knowledge of the ingredients were obvious.

The dessert course was a Chocolate Cremeux, essentially a chocolate pudding, topped with big shards of honeycomb. My iPhone photo does not do it justice.chocolate cremeaux with honeycombIf you’ve ever had a Crunchie chocolate bar or sponge toffee, you know what Honeycomb is. Essentially, you make caramel and add baking soda at the end to produce a bubbly toffee confection. This honeycomb topping was the inspiration for my birthday cake.honeycombBefore he began cooking, Chef Vinson emphasized the importance of “mise en place”. Read through the recipe, measure and chop all your ingredients and set out all pans and tools you need before you start cooking. Nowhere is this more important than in the preparation of honeycomb.

You will need a candy thermometer and a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silpat sheet. The process goes quickly, so don’t walk away from the stove. Chef Patrillo left his honeycomb unadorned, but I dipped the corners of mine in bittersweet chocolate and sprinkled them with a bit of flaky sea salt because that’s the way we roll around here!

 

For the cake, I turned to Brian Hart Hoffman’s book “Bake From Scratch.” I thought his classic golden cake with buttermilk would be a perfect base for honeycomb.cake ingredientsadding eggsbatter in cake pansI filled and covered the cake with a salted caramel buttercream.piping icingWith a cup of tea or a glass of milk, this indulgent cake is the perfect way to celebrate a birthday.with a cup of teawith a glass of milk

Click here to print the recipe for Caramel Honeycomb Birthday Cake

a slice taken out of the cake