This is my mother’s birthday cake. It looks great, doesn’t it? Well, the cake itself was a disaster!!! I had had the great idea of trying to make a new cake recipe that looked good the night before her birthday after she had gone to bed. To begin with it looked like it was going well and then in the final five minutes of cooking the cake collapsed in the middle.
So what to do?
I had already decided how it was going to be filled and iced so I had a load of butter cream and ganache on hand. I filled the cake with almost all of the butter cream in the centre and very little around the edge. All very well and good but the centre of the cake was still about half the thickness of the edges. In comes the ganache. I pooled it in the centre and then lightly spread it round the edges so that the whole cake looked as though it was all the same depth. Then I placed the crystalized flowers to disguise the slight dip in the middle et voila!! A beautiful birthday cake!!
(The only problem here was that the combination of the cake and the filling was so rich you could only eat one slice before entering a sugar coma!!)
Anna in the kitchen 