I made a Chocolate Raspberry Birthday Cake this year for my wife’s birthday. Chocolate is her favorite and she requested some sort of berry or fruit with it. I originally found this recipe for Drunken Cherry Chocolate Cake that I intended to use, but I found it impossible to find cherries in the middle of January. Plenty of raspberries were available and surprisingly they were even on sale, so I decided to go with that.
First I made the chocolate cake layers and piped a border of buttercream around the bottom one.
Then I filled the reservoir I’d just created with cherry compote that I’d made.
With that done I put the second layer on top of the first and iced the whole thing with chocolate icing (this was a chocolate-heavy cake).
Of course, the final step was decorations. I tried making tuiles for the first time. They didn’t work very well, but I got a few shards I was able to use. I used a bunch of gold leaf and gold dust that I had, along with a bunch of artisanal sprinkles from my favorite etsy sprinkle maker.
My wife and the rest of the family were very happy with it. We were in the middle of moving when I made this cake, in fact, it was the last thing I baked in my old kitchen, so I was just happy I managed to make a cake at all. It was really dense and chocolatey, the kind of cake you can only have a very small piece of, but it was delicious.
