Corey's Birthday

So the Fun-A-Day experiment is over, and even though I didn't quite make it through 31 days of baking I still put in a heck of a lot of effort to learn the cupcake craft and create edible art during the month of January. So I'm gonna give myself a pat on the back and say, "Job well done!"

In honor of the man who brings us Fun-A-Day, some friends and I planned a surprise hoop-la for his 29th birthday. I volunteered to bake his cake, naturally, and was sent a recipe for a pretty fantastic sounding vegan Chocolate Cherry Cake. I gave it a go, but in my characteristic way, I found myself incapable of following the instructions. Unfortunately, the cake did not take kindly to my tweaks and ended up being quite sloppy. It also tasted...less than stellar. It was edible, but so so dense! And I couldn't find cherry extract at the coop or my neighborhood grocery store, and I was NOT about to drag my lazy butt all the way down to South Philly in 2 feet of snow to buy it, so I improvised with vanilla and almond extract. The almond gave it a marzipan-y flavor, which I usually like but it turned out not to be a good pair with the chocolate and cherry in this case. :(

Not the prettiest cake in the world, right? When I pulled it out, I wondered how I was going to put cherries on top without them just rolling down the slope.

But they stayed on. Probably with a little help from the chocolate ganache I poured over it first. I thought the cake was so ugly that I needed to cover up the cracks with some sort of frosting or glaze. The ganache was also an attempt to glue one side of the cake back together, which crumbled when I took it out of the pan.