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.
![Cake Layers](https://bakedandchurned.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/layering-1-783x1024.png)
Then I filled the reservoir I’d just created with cherry compote that I’d made.
![Raspberry topped cake layer](https://bakedandchurned.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ras_layer-2-992x1024.png)
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).
![Iced Cake](https://bakedandchurned.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/iced-1-1024x994.png)
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.
![Decorated Cake](https://bakedandchurned.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/decorated-925x1024.png)
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.
![Finished Cake](https://bakedandchurned.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/candles-2-952x1024.png)