Doesn’t sound like much of an achievement, right? But if I’m correct in my thinking, this is only the second chocolate cake I’ve ever made in my life. You see, I do not like chocolate cake. Therefore, I never make it.
But guess who loves chocolate cake? Yep… my kid.
Even though he loved last year’s banana cake, I think I got away with doing what I wanted for the last time. Because now he has opinions. Such big opinions. And one of those was, his birthday cake must be chocolate.
So I did far too much research, as well as asking people for their recipes and their advice. Because it had to work the first time – I didn’t want to make test chocolate cake – who would eat it? Not me. And what about icing? How do you make chocolate icing?
I also needed a concept, because growing up in Australia, one very important part of birthdays was the Women’s Weekly Cookbook. And despite the fact that I’m no cake decorator, it needed to be a little bit impressive.
Eventually I had all the components ready. Sam helped me mix the cake up and to my despair, screwed up his nose when tasting the raw cake mix. Well, it was too late to go back now, so I baked the thing, and by some miracle, he was very happy with the end result. He was even happier with the chocolate ganache I made.
However, I quickly realised that Sam was more excited about the chocolate decorations than the cake itself, so with no one left to eat the bare bones, there’s still some hanging out in the freezer, and I can’t get rid of it easily, because I don’t like it myself.
As opposed to the banana cake that I made for my birthday (Sammy’s choice). That thing got demolished very quickly, and there was even a hint from the little boy that he might be happy with a banana cake next year.
So it looks like I’m going to have to continue this trend I’ve started… might be about time to go and get myself some proper cake tins!
an aussie in austria 