Anniversary Cake

Crisp and I recently celebrated our three-year dating anniversary. For one of his gifts, I decided to make him his very own cake. I thought of all the sweet things that he likes in desserts, and I found an appropriate recipe: A Coconut Rum Cake with White Chocolate Ganache. (It's a recipe from Bobby Flay that I "adapted.") The result: another somewhat awkward cake!

The cake itself was VERY dense. It called for 6 large yolks and 6 large whole eggs. I was supposed to whip the eggs and yolks, with sugar, over a pot of boiling water until the mixture tripled in volume. After 35 minutes of whippin' it good, it never actually tripled in volume. Maybe it doubled in volume... but the cake came out of the oven looking all right to me!

Next, I took a cup and a half of rum, mixed it up with some sugar, cooked it up, and then poured it all over sliced halves of the cakes. The rum fumes in my small kitchen made me a little dizzy!

While the cake soaked in its rum, I got to work on the white chocolate ganache. I melted chocolate with coconut milk, and whipped up two different batches of cream. The cream never actually got as whipped as I'd like (and I was working well past 11:30pm at this point). However, the recipe anticipated a runny frosting, and noted that if you let the ganache chill in the refrigerator, it would thicken up. I decided to leave mine in the fridge overnight, so that it'd get really thick and so that I could get some sleep!

The next morning, the ganache frosting was still a little thin, but I snuck a little taste of it. It was delicious, so I slapped it all over the cakes anyway!!

All the layers were assembled, and I still had a LOT of frosting left!

This picture really highlights the runny frosting :(

What do you do to camoflauge runny frosting? Cover the entire cake in coconut flakes, of course!

I topped each slice with blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries macerated with Chamboard.

Even though I thought this cake was another awkward creation, Crisp really liked it!
And I was proud of myself for taking on such a challenging recipe.
So, overall, I think it was a success!!