The past weekend I baked my birthday cake early. I don’t mean a few days early, I meant a week early. Why? you ask. Well, this weekend I’m pretty busy with going to the Cook.Eat.Live food event, meeting up with a bunch of friends for dinner, and trying to fit in some studying time for the GREs in between (I’m planning to go back to grad school.) I thought I might as well bake it early and eat my way through with the help of my parents and Helen.
Broken up chocolate & baked cake
Once again, the good people of Scharffen Berger came to my aid, providing me the milk chocolate for this cake recipe. The recipe, white velvet cake with milk chocolate ganache is also from Scharffen Berger’s The Essence of Chocolate. Frankly, after trying multiple recipes from their book this is a great book for baking anything chocolate-related. Six recipes attempted and all were successes. I highly recommend.
To explain what’s in the white velvet cake, it’s basically a pale yellow/white cake with a very fine texture due to the use of cake flour. It’s a very simple cake that my mom wondered why I want to do such a thing on my 24th birthday? Frankly, I don’t want to deal with a fussy recipe and don’t want to put in too much time with my birthday cake. I’m aiming for simplicity this year.
Cake slice
Anyway, the cake was good as it sounded. A delicate crumb cake, that has a hint of butter, barely sweet, sandwiched and coated with milk chocolate ganache. What’s so great about Scharffen Berger’s milk chocolate is the caramelized milk flavor that’s very swoonworthy. (Heck, when I was decorating the cake. I was scraping a third of my ganache into a pastry bag, my mom walked over to the counter where I placed the nearly empty bowl, picked up the spatula, and licked it. She told me the ganache was delicious and wanted more! Alas, I can’t spare any.)
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. To those of you who follow or actually look at my Flickr photos, I did attend to their 
