Birthday Cake!

A few days before my husband’s 30th birthday, I set down James Peterson’s Baking in front of him and told him “Here, choose any cake from this book, and I’ll make it for your birthday!” He looked at the pages for a few minutes and then exclaimed “that sounds good! I’d like that one”, pointing at a 2 page spread (that also refers to 5 other recipes to be found throughout the book for different elements of the cake). It was a Chocolate Hazelnut Cake with Chocolate Filling and Hazelnut Buttercream. As I looked at the page over his shoulder, my eyes grew wider, and my jaw dropped  several inches. I could not believe what I had just done to myself!  My husband should have known that I had never made a layered cake before! How could he do this to me? Of course, I kept my mouth shut, after all I was the only one to blame for this. Truth be told, he really had no idea how difficult his choice of cake would be for me to make. He just saw the title of the cake and thought it sounded yummy!

I went grocery shopping, gathered the many ingredients, and embarked on my most ambitious baking project to date. Little did I know that it would end up taking more than 7 hours to complete! I messed up some important elements of the cake and had to start them all over, losing a lot of time in the process!

I will not even attempt to share a recipe for this here… it would take me days to put it together! I am not one to boast but  I feel I’ve earned the right to brag about this cake as  I am still amazed I managed to pull it off. I mean, look at it! Isn’t it beautiful? Ok, ok, I’ll stop now. You get the point. I am very proud of myself!

The first step was to make dacquoise discs, which are rounds of French meringue made with hazelnut powder (I processed whole hazelnuts for this).

While the dacquoise discs were baking, I made the chocolate cake. This is one of the steps I had to do all over again because after baking it, I realized that I put twice as much flour as was needed (the original recipe was for 2 cakes but I only needed one so I did everything in half but forgot to do it with the flour). I only found out about my mistake when I cut the cake in half and saw that it was way too dense and hard. I lost over an hour over this stupid mistake.

While the cake was baking, I made the hazelnut buttercream. It was the kind that required cooking a sugar/water syrup and then beating it in the egg yolks and butter. I needed 7 cups of it as it would go in between layers as well as cover the whole cake.

I’ll just let the next pictures speak for themselves, they show the cake in its different stages.

At this point I thought my cake was going to be a wreck. It looked so crooked! But thankfully, I managed to straighten it without doing too much damage!

And the final product! To decorate it, I ground up more hazelnuts to put around the cake, piped some hazelnut buttercream for the top and made chocolate shavings.

And here’s the birthday boy waiting for everyone to be served before taking his first bite!

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