The only successful thing about the Un-birthday was the cake. The concept was fun. The invitations were irresistible. It was just another blah winter day that was in severe need of cheerfulness. And what did we get? Snow. A simple dusting of snow was enough to keep Olivia's little friends away. Both our little invitees live in the country. I guess country roads are treacherous in just a little dusting of snow. Go figure.
I've combined a lot of learning into this one cake. Over the last year, I've learned from my mother how to make her own special brand of decorative buttercream. Holds it's shape better than regular buttercream, but still tastes great. She's also schooled me in the delicate art of forming roses from this frosting. I'd watched her do roses all my life, never really considering that I might one day try my hand at it.
It's a two layer yellow cake, frosted at first in a layer of Mom's buttercream, chilled, then coated with room-temperature ganache. To be precise, the ganache was at 68 degrees Farenheit. I used a digital thermometer. I followed the instructions in Nick Malgieri's "Chocolate," with excellent results. If I'd just chilled the cake shortly after letting the ganache set, it could have been perfect. As it was, I left it out and proceeded to decorate the top with my battalion of pink and red roses, dark purple sugar-studded violets, and bright green leaves. My new decorator's kit received heavy usage.
Another time-consuming element of this cake was the individual mixing of different colors and flavoring each color as I saw fit. The green leaves were vanilla peppermint, the pink and red roses were strawberry, and the purple violets were cherry. So, we still ate the sucker. And we still sang the un-birthday song. And we still had a good time. Louis has already made an order for his un-birthday cake--lemon meringue pie, which obviously isn't a cake, but sounds damn good.
