Friday, May 10, 2013

Happy Birthday to Me: S'more Cake!

I took all kinds of pictures of my birthday cake, wanting to blog about it, and then never got around to it for almost two months. Better late than never, right?

Steve always offers to make my birthday cake, but I actually *like* to bake. The part I don't like to do is frosting/decorating. So I said, I'll make the cake, and you can do the frosting. All his other awesome qualities, and my husband is a cake decorator extraordinaire, too? Oh yes, folks. Every time there is a birthday around here, I am the one with the big ideas and Steve is the artist who can actually execute them. That's the only way the boys' birthday cakes end up looking like this instead of ending up on a blog of Pinterest fails :) At any rate, Steve got more excited when he found out that my birthday cake would involve the use of a blowtorch...

S'mores are probably one of my all-time favorite desserts. So when I saw a recipe for a s'more layer cake in The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, I knew I had to try it. Elijah helped me make the cake; I made (and repeatedly sampled) the milk chocolate filling; and then Steve tackled the frosting (the seven-minute kind I hate making) and assembled the cake.

 
 
 
 

Is that fun or what? A toasted marshmallow effect.

My verdict upon tasting it: if s'mores were a cake, they would taste like this. But s'mores are meant to be eaten as s'mores, not as cake. The cake had a graham flavor, but I prefer lots of other flavors of cake. The milk chocolate filling was delicious, but never thickened enough (even overnight in the fridge) to work well as filling. It squeezed out the sides as soon as you stacked the layers, so we ended up just having to drizzle it over our cake slices. And the frosting was indeed marshmallow-y, but not my favorite frosting by a long shot. I've made seven-minute frosting once before where it gets this kind of crystallized crust the next day. This one didn't do that--it kind of disintegrated/dissolved (as you can see on the photo below, which I didn't remember to take until a couple of days later). I much prefer a substantial frosting.


So I won't be making a s'more layer cake again, but it was definitely a fun experiment :)

2 comments:

Danielle said...

Hmmm, this was on my list to make after looking at the cookbook, maybe I'll pass and try the red velvet wine one instead. ;)

Amy said...

the red wine chocolate cake is excellent, Danielle - I've made it a couple of times (the web version...I think the book version is a little different, though I don't remember how).