It’s my birthday! Well, it was my birthday last week. I’m a little late in posting this. In fact, blogging has been rare treat around these parts lately, and what better day to treat myself than my birthday!
Some people talk about the baker’s dilemma. Do you bake your own cake or not? For me, it’s a no brainer. Control freak that I am, I always want to bake my own cake. Unless someone wants to deliver a Momofuku cake to my door. Then I might change my mind, but this year nostalgia took over and I chose my childhood favorite- yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Of course, my childhood yellow birthday cake came from a box, so I wanted this cake to resemble that in the light and fluffy department, but perhaps less so in the alarmingly yellow department (seriously, what do they put in there?).
I’ve never been a big fan of canned frosting, so I wanted to do something different than the traditional chocolate buttercream. I thought about making my go to chocolate sour cream frosting, but after some googling, came across Hummingbird High’s recipe for creme fraiche frosting. By swapping out creme fraiche for the sour cream, I ended up with a frosting that was not too sweet, ultra rich, and chocolaty in all the right ways. I dare you not to eat half of it before you even start frosting the cake.
The actual cake recipe is a paired down version of the “All Occasion Downy Yellow Butter Cake” from The Cake Bible
In the spirit of being more grown up, I was going to leave the sprinkles off of my birthday cake this year. But for me, part of the pleasure of eating birthday cake is the mouthful of crunchy nonpareils that come with it, so I decided to go sprinkle crazy because I’m the birthday girl!
. I think my inner 6-year-old would have gone nuts for little chocolate mushrooms, though. I saw them recently at Daiso, a Japanese version of a dollar(ish) store that opened up near my house. I love browsing all of the miniature knick knacks and aisles of Japanese candy, so when I saw these little mushrooms, I knew I wanted to use them on a cake (except the first time I bought a package I ate the entire thing on the way home and was too embarrassed to go back and get more).
, this cake would be equally adorable covered in meringue mushrooms. If mushrooms are too weird for you, perhaps candy hearts would be a fun substitute.
