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Boozy Yellow Birthday Cake with Chocolate Frosting and Caramelized White Chocolate Ganache

Boozy Yellow Birthday Cake with Chocolate Frosting and Caramelized White Chocolate Ganache

Guys, I'm 28 today.

I don't have too many feels about it, except that, according to this Buzzfeed article, it's supposed to be the best year of my twenties. I don't know about that, but I do know that I have a reservation at one of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco, a new creme brûlée torch courtesy of the boyf (since I woefully gave mine away when I left Portland), and the BEST yellow birthday cake recipe to celebrate:


Because if you've been a reader of my blog for sometime, you'll know that I'm a firm believer in the fact that birthdays should be celebrated with a yellow cake covered in generous amounts of dark chocolate frosting. I made one for Erlend's birthday a few years ago, and I made myself this saffron butter cake with cardamom and milk chocolate fudge frosting last year.

I'm cheating a little bit with this year since this is actually the same recipe I made for Erlend with some slight variations. The original recipe is one of my favorites and comes from Miette, one of my favorite bakeries in San Francisco. Its a decadent butter cake that uses TEN egg yolks (and no egg whites!) to give the cake its sunny yellow color; the cake is then soaked with a simple syrup to keep it ever so moist.


So what did I do to a cake recipe that I love so much to make it even better? One word: BOOZE. Lots of it. Since I love the flavor combination of chocolate orange, I soaked the cake with a Grand Marnier syrup and added some orange zest to the yellow cake batter. The boozy orange paired wonderfully with the dark chocolate ganache frosting.

And because it was my birthday, I figured I'd be extra freaking decadent and top the cake off with a caramelized white chocolate ganache. Did you know that if you roast white chocolate at a low temperature for about an hour or so (but more on this later, in the baker's notes — don't panic just yet!), it caramelizes and you get the most wonderful toasted white chocolate flavor? The end result is almost like a dulce de leche caramel and it's absolutely heavenly.


Some baker's notes:

• There's a lot going on with this cake, so I suggest breaking it down by making the cake first, and then the syrup two ganaches the following day. Make the cake first and cover it in plastic wrap and keep it in the refrigerator until you're ready to frost it — the cake's butter flavor actually intensifies overnight.


• So, this cake uses a shit-ton of egg yolks. You will need to use an entire dozen's total for the cake and the frosting combined. I recognize the ridiculousness of that situation (but it was my birthday, and I had to indulge myself), so let me offer you up these recipes for the leftover eggwhites: use 4 egg whites for this rhubarb and pistachio pavlova, another 4 egg whites for this white chocolate malt cake, and the rest for an egg white scramble with a ton of spinach, fresh herbs, and gruyere. 


• Let's talk more about caramelized white chocolate, because I know I just dropped it in there last minute like whoa. I first found out about the phenomenon ever since spying this recipe in Food52's Genius Recipes cookbook and I've been playing around with it since. My one complaint, however, is that the original recipe requires you to heat at a ridiculously low temperature (265 (F)) for almost an hour, along with stirring it every three minutes or so. It's fussy, because if the chocolate gets too hot, it seizes and turns into solid crumbles instead of caramelizing.
  
  So a couple of things: because the oven in my new apartment runs so insanely hot and I really don't have time to stir something in the oven every 3 minutes, I started playing around with trying to find a shortcut. I found out that you can basically get the same result in almost a quarter of the time suggested by the original recipe if, instead of baking in an oven, you cook the white chocolate over the stovetop. The trick is to melt the white chocolate over low heat, and then once it's melted completely, turn the heat on high and to scorch it. Stirring constantly to distribute the heat evenly throughout the mixture achieves the same sort of caramelization, and I found that I actually had more control over the final flavor using the stovetop method — because it's happening right in front of you, you can really control how roasted and caramelized you want the final product to be.


• It took me a couple of times to get the ratio of white chocolate to cream for the topping; don't be afraid to troubleshoot it! If you find the ganache to be too runny, feel free to add a few more chunks of white chocolate to thicken it up. If it's too thick, add a splash of cream. The trick is to add just a little bit at a time to get the consistency you want. Because you're going to be pouring it over the cake, you're going to want a ganache that's still warm and just ever-so-slightly runnier than normal to get that pretty spilled frosting look. The ganache will set as it cools.

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