I first baked and posted about this cake in 2016, for my own birthday. It was probably one of the most delicious things I have ever baked. However, my photos from that post (see below) do not do it justice.
The lighting is awful, the white balance is off and the angle I shot the cake at is just wrong. It does nothing to showcase the majestic height of this beauty. I have learned a thing or two about lighting and composition since then. It’s always a very satisfying thing to look back and see your own progress, no matter what you have chosen as your life’s work.
This was my starting point, but I made a few changes. I browned the butter for the cake. Brown butter adds a layer of toasty, nutty deliciousness. Making it couldn’t be simpler. Butter is composed of butterfat, milk protein and water. When you brown butter, you are essentially toasting the milk protein. As you heat the butter, and it begins to bubble and sputter away, the water evaporates and the hot butterfat begins to cook the milk solids, turning them from creamy yellow to a splendid speckled brown colour and your whole kitchen smells like toasted hazelnuts. It’s insanely gorgeous!
In addition to the salted caramel buttercream between each layer, I decided to slip in an extra layer of almond meringue. The textural difference of pillowy soft cake layers is fantastic with the chewy crunchy meringue.
The cake is topped with a crown of English toffee. I made my own, because I could not find any in Ottawa this week. Laura Secord used to make an excellent version, but they are closed now. Purdy’s Chocolates normally carries it, but they were out of stock. If you live near a Trader Joes, they make an excellent English Toffee.
I made the cake again this weekend for my daughter’s 29th birthday. One of the pitfalls of having a mother who is a food blogger, is that your birthday cake is usually presented with a few slices removed and looking a bit rough around the edges from being photographed for a few hours. I always felt slightly guilty about this, so this year I made 2 smaller 6 inch cakes. One for me, to slice and shoot and the other just for the birthday celebration. Everyone loved this idea. More cake for all and no mom yelling, “don’t touch the cake yet. I need just a few more shots.”
This cake is a labour of love. Split the work over a few days and enjoy the journey. It’s worth it.
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.”
What I love best about my birthday is making my own cake. I spend weeks before the actual day pondering flavours and textures. Buttercream is not optional, it is a requirement. While some people might think it’s a little sad to have to bake your own birthday cake, I disagree. I get exactly what I want, and get so much joy creating it.
If you’re looking for a one bowl “dump and stir” cake, this is not the post for you. My birthday cake has many elements and usually takes the better part of a day.
This year’s cake is a “virtual collaboration” between Anna Olson, Rose Levy Beranbaum and me! I started with Anna’s Classic Vanilla Birthday Cake, which is a perfect canvas for everything. I had my heart set on a maple cake. I thought it would be a good idea to substitute maple sugar for the granulated sugar in the recipe to really intensify the maple flavour. I was wrong. I have never baked with maple sugar before, but the texture is different from that of traditional granulated sugar, and it resulted in a crumbly cake that tasted really strange. When I remade it with granulated sugar, it turned out perfectly. Moist and light with a beautiful tender crumb.
Next I moved onto the buttercream. I decided to make Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Neoclassic Buttercream, which is basically a French buttercream that uses egg yolks and butter. This is not a buttercream for the faint of heart. We’re not fooling around here . This is straight-up rich and luxurious. Rose suggests that you can replace the corn syrup for maple syrup and that’s what I did. Rich and silky , practically exploding with intense maple flavour.
The final component of my cake is the addition of a layer of crunch. I love a cake that combines texture. I crumbled up some Dad’s Oatmeal Cookies (because maple and oatmeal!!!!) and mixed them with malted milk powder (the umami bomb of the baking world, as Stella Parks is fond of saying), a bit of sugar, some melted butter and a pinch of salt. Mix the crumb mixture until clumps form. Bake and cool. The finished crumble is crunchy and very addictive. It reminds me of the clumps in granola. The recipe makes more than you will need, so there is some leftover for snacking!
This week marks my baby’s 25th birthday. A quarter of a century! How is that possible? I think that officially makes me old, but I’m good with that. I’ve earned my wrinkles. I view them as badges of wisdom.
For his birthday cake, I knew that chocolate of some sort must be incorporated. Last year I went full-on chocolate with the ultimate gluten-free chocolate cake. I think his favourite was the smarties rainbow cake I made a few years ago. Ever since I saw the cookies and cream cake on preppy kitchen, I have wanted to recreate it. You need to check out his blog. I have picked up so many baking tips from him. Do you know about cake strips? They’re wrapped around the cake pan and they help prevent domed and cracked tops and over-cooked edges. I used them for these cakes and I had the most level cakes ever. No trimming necessary.
My son follows a mostly gluten-free diet so I created a GF version. The original cake used chopped Oreos in the batter. I found GF ones at Trader Joes, but there are several other brands of GF chocolate sandwich cookies. I made a Swiss meringue buttercream. It is a bit more work than an American buttercream, but I think the light and silky texture is worth it.
Last week was my birthday and I made my own cake. Some people think that having to bake your own birthday cake is quite sad, but I’m not one of them. When you bake your own cake, you get exactly what you want. I gave quite a bit of thought about what to bake. (Way more thought than is probably healthy, I’ll admit).
As an early birthday present to myself I ordered Bobbette and Belle’s new cookbook. I read through it and stuck post it notes on over half half the pages. The photography is gorgeous and there are so many recipes that inspired me. It is a very well written book with lots of tips and techniques. While some of the recipes are not for rookie bakers, the instructions they give are very thorough. As soon as I saw their Salted Caramel Toffee Cake, I knew I found my intended. Three layers of classic vanilla cake filled with homemade salted caramel buttercream, toffee pieces and a caramel drizzle.
This was my starting point, but I made a few changes. here’s how my cake came together.
I started with their recipe for a classic vanilla cake but I browned the butter first. Brown butter adds a layer of toasty, nutty deliciousness. Making it couldn’t be simpler. Butter is composed of butterfat, milk protein and water. When you brown butter, you are essentially toasting the milk protein. As you heat the butter, and it begins to bubble and sputter away, the water evaporates and the hot butterfat begins to cook the milk solids, turning them from creamy yellow to a splendid speckled brown colour and your whole kitchen smells like toasted hazelnuts. It’s insanely gorgeous!
It is best to brown the butter in a light coloured pot, so that you can easily monitor the browning process. Note that only the milk solids will turn brown. the butterfat stays clear. As soon as you reach the perfect brown colour, pour the butter out of the hot pot to let it cool completely.You will need to chill the brown butter and let it harden before you can cream it with the sugar.Divide the batter evenly into 3 pans and bake.Next I decided to alternate layers of brown butter vanilla cake with layers of almond meringue. I thought the textural difference of pillowy soft cake layers would be fantastic with chewy crunchy meringue. A salted caramel buttercream would be the perfect glue to hold all these layers together.Admittedly, there are a lot of components to prepare for this cake. Don’t try to do it all in one day. Make the components on day one and assemble on day 2. I have included detailed instructions on how to make all the parts, in the recipe below.
If you have a coconut lover in your life, this cake is the perfect way to declare your love for them. The very first time I had this cake was several years ago. My niece, KK, made it for my mom’s 76th birthday. She was only 10 years old at the time. She has been baking ever since she could grasp a spatula. At her house, half birthdays are celebrated with as much hoopla and joy as full birthdays, so with a five person family, that works out to 10 cakes a year and almost 150 cakes in her short lifetime. She has some mad baking skills!This is my twist on her cake. I have added a coconut caramel filling to spread between the layers. This filling, known as kaya is created by cooking coconut milk, eggs, granulated and coconut palm sugar and pandan leaves over a double boiler until the sugar becomes caramelized and everything thickens into a beautiful jam-like consistency. I learned how to make kaya from pastry chef Anna Olsen on The Food Network. Kaya is traditionally spread on toast and then dipped in soft boiled eggs for breakfast in Singapore and Malaysia. Clearly I grew up on the wrong continent. All I got for breakfast, when growing up was a bowl of Cheerios!
Pandan leaves are long narrow bright green leaves that grow on a tropical plant known as the Screwpine. Commonly found throughout Southeast Asia, they have been called, “The vanilla of the east.” They can be found fresh or frozen in at Asian grocery stores or online. Vanilla extract is a good substitute if you can’t find pandan leaves.
Making the coconut caramel (Kaya) filling takes time and patience. If you are short of either, just double the amount of buttercream frosting and use it to fill the layers as well as frost the top and sides of this cake. It will still be delicious, but I will say that Kaya pushes this cake further along on the bliss meter.
When you first start cooking the kaya, the pandan leaves will give off a grassy aroma. As they begin to steep in the coconut milk, eggs and sugar, the fragrance becomes more subdued, reminiscent of almonds and sweet cream.Although my sister would never do this, I weigh the cake batter to make sure I get an equal amount in each pan. That way, the layers all cook at the same rate. To frost the cake, I made an American buttercream. The recipe I used comes from Nila, over at thetoughcookie.com. She is a buttercream wizard. Check out her Battle of the Buttercream posts. She taught me that the addition of a few drops of lemon juice really brighten all the other flavours of the buttercream without making it taste like lemon. Really cool trick!
I piped a border of buttercream around each layer and then filled the center with the coconut caramel filling. The border keeps the coconut filling from oozing out,
My baby will be turning 21 this week. I wanted to make him a very special cake, but he is not exactly co-operative that way. Every year he wants the exact same cake; chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream icing. For a food blogger that is quite sad. How am I supposed to have new things to blog about if he requests the same cake every year?
I was dying to create a rainbow cake like this one, or this stunning jellybean cake from one of my favourite bloggers, the amazingly talented Steph at raspberricupcakes. However, I knew that if I showed up without a chocolate cake, disapointment would surely ensue. Steph’s jellybean cake got me thinking and I decided to decorate the outside of the cake in Smarties. When my son was 2 years old, I was a bit concerned that he might be colour blind. Every time I quizzed him about the colour of something was he always answered green. He said it with a little glint in his eye and then laughed, so I just wasn’t sure. His dad is colour blind, so it was a distinct possibility.
I decided to test him. I bought a box of Smarties, put a pink one in my hand and dangled it in front of him. As he went to grab it i snatched my hand back and said, “Tell mommy what colour this is and you can have it.” “Pink” he squealed. He named every colour in the box correctly. Turns out he just liked to play mind games with his mom. So in honour of his 21st birthday I made him this cake.The cake and icing are simple to make. This is a quick chocolate cake recipe (adapted from Noreen Gilletz’s chocolate cake recipe in Pleasures of Your Food Processor) that comes together in minutes in the food processor. Vegetable oil in the batter makes it super moist. I add about a 1/4 cup of espresso to the milk because coffee and chocolate are a supreme combo. The icing is a simple buttercream made with cocoa powder, butter, icing sugar, a bit of espresso and a hit of vanilla extract. I just discovered Cacao Barry’s extra brut cocoa powder and it is deep, dark and intensely chocolatey. The vanilla extract in the photo below is homemade by my neighbour Holly. She made it using Madagascar vanilla beans steeped in bourbon. Who knew you could do that?
The most time consuming part of making this cake was sorting the Smarties by colour (I used 6 200 gram bags) and getting them on the cake in nice straight (well almost straight) lines. It’s times like this that I really miss my sister Jody and wish we still lived in the same city. Her rows would have been perfect!
I made a double recipe of the cake (each recipe makes 2 layers), and used 3 layers, since this was the perfect height to get one row of each colour of the rainbow. I froze the extra 4th layer. I also made a double recipe of the icing. The flags, stick on letters and straws were from Michaels.
Jamie was thrilled with the cake, so thrilled that he asked if I would make another one exactly like it, for when his friends come over this weekend. I told him I’d think about it!
You always remember your first. No, I’m not talking about THAT first. This is a not that kind of blog!
I have the good fortune of being blessed with 14 nephews and 9 nieces. I have a special place in my heart for each and every one of them, but there is something quite special about becoming an aunt for the first time. My oldest nephew was an adorable, sweet-natured baby and has turned into a wonderful, responsible, very funny young man with a strong sense of family. His 29th birthday coincided with a visit to our cottage last week. I wanted to make a family dinner for him. I know he has been following the Paleo diet for some time now, and birthday cake is not really on the approved Paleo list. However, a birthday without cake is just too sad for me to contemplate, so last week I sent him the following e-mail:
Would you eat cake on your birthday? If so, what would your preference be? Chocolate, Berry Shortcake, Carrot, or anything else.
I got the following response:
Well, I would have some cake if there was one in front of me, but I’d rather not. I know I’d enjoy it in the moment, but I’d probably regret the sugar and gluten the next day. But if I had to choose? Chocolate or Berry Shortcake sounds great.
As far as what I eat…pretty much meat and veg these days – still on the Paleo diet. I basically stay away from gluten/grains, dairy, and most processed food. That being said, however, given your penchant for baking (I don’t remember the last time I was at your cottage and didn’t see something delicious cooling down on those huge racks you’ve got) I’d imagine I’ll be doing a bit of cheating those few days.
Anything I can bring?
WHAT???? Talk about an ambivalent response! How was I to interpret that?
This party was beginning to look like no fun at all. I fired off a quick e-mail:
I decided that to go with a full-on, loaded with gluten, dairy and sugar cake would be cruel, but it really seemed to me that he was asking me to help him cheat. So. I decided to make cupcakes, because they’re small and not really a true cake. Sort of an ambivalent cake for his ambivalent response.
For the base of the cupcakes, I knew chocolate was the right road to follow. I have tried many different chocolate cake recipes over the years, and have come to the conclusion that butter is not always better when it comes to the moistest cake. Vegetable oil really does make a better cake. Our family’s go-to chocolate cake comes from Noreen Gilletz’s “Pleasures of Your Food Processor.” Rich, moist and very deeply chocolate, but not too sweet, it makes a perfect cake or cupcakes every time.
I wanted to try a different buttercream this time. A few years ago I had dinner at a wonderful restaurant in Ottawa called Beckta. Before the meal they brought bread and some type of butter spread to the table. I was smitten from the first bite! I begged the waiter for the recipe for this spread. He told me that they melt butter until it turns a medium nutty brown colour. Then they chill it ao that it becomes a solid again and whip it with a little regular butter. This was my first foray into the land of browned butter (the French call it beurre noisette) and I must say that it has haunted my dreams ever since.
Given my success with browned butter berry tarts, I suspected that browned butter in a buttercream would be fantastic. Something magical happens when you brown butter. It enhances the flavour of just about anything you add it to, and the aroma will drive you wild. Making brown butter is quite simple. Use a saucepan with a light coloured bottom, so that you will be able to judge when the butter is browned to perfection. A dark bottom pan can lead to burned butter and trust me, that aroma and taste will not leave you craving more!
As the butter melts, it will begin to foam. Swirl the pan to ensure even melting. The color will progress from pale yellow to golden-tan to, finally, a burnt sienna (remember that crayola crayon colour?). Once you smell that nutty aroma, take the pan off the heat and transfer the browned butter into a heat-proof bowl to cool.
The milk solids will cook faster and you’ll see them settle on the bottom of the pan. You can strain the brown butter through cheesecloth to leave those milk solid particles behind, or you can incorporate them into the buttercream. I really like the almost burnt taste of them as well as seeing the specks of browned butter in the icing, so I did not strain mine.
The brown butter is chilled for about an hour until it becomes solid again. The ideal temperature of the brown butter for making the buttercream is room temperature. If it becomes too hard in the fridge, leave it on the counter to soften a bit. Beat the brown butter with icing sugar, a pinch of salt and a little vanilla extract.
Fit a disposable piping bag with a large star tip and frost the cupcakes.
The cupcakes were a huge hit. My nephew inhaled two of them and asked for two more to be wrapped up to go. I have a feeling he may have had a bit of a gluten-sugar hangover the next morning, but I think he will agree that they were worth it.
