Lacquered Birthday Cake

Normally for birthdays I just phone up a bakery and order a cake, simple, no stress, just pick it up and enjoy. However, having baked my daughter's birthday cake it was only fair that I would also bake my son's birthday cake and besides if I hadn't I know I would have heard something like -"mom loves me more because I got a homemade cake" to which my son would have responded with something like - "yes, but I'm mom's favourite".

I've been wanting to try the lacquered glaze in Heavenly Cakes by Rose Levy Bernanbaum for a while now so I knew for sure that I would use it on this cake. I also wanted the cake to be a genoise with a custard cream filling and frosted with a ganache. All of this sounded pretty good to me but in the end it wasn't the best combination of choices.

I made the genoise the day before using the recipe for Genoise Rose because it had five eggs in it and I thought it would give me more cake baked in a 9" x 3" round cake pan. This went off without a hitch. The cake baked up high, light and lovely and I could cut it into three layers.

Normally I use a recipe from The Five Roses Baking Book that makes a great custard cream that holds up really well in cake layers but I wanted to try something new. I decided to use a recipe for a chantilly custard cream in the Joy of Cooking and although it was good it just wasn't very stiff but once it cooled I managed to fill the cake layers moistened with coffee flavoured sugar syrup and all was well.

I made a simple ganache of chocolate and whipping cream and when this cooled I frosted the cake but this is where I realized that this wasn't the best choice for the light genoise because as I frosted the cake the cake's crust would lift off. I had to use a light hand so this would not happen. I also had to be careful frosting the sides of the cake as some of the custard was oozing out and made frosting difficult, but slowly I managed to frost the entire cake and by the time I was finished I thought the cake looked pretty good.

I had heard how easy it was to make the lacquer glaze and sure enough it was. Once it cooled to the proper temperature I poured it all at once over the cake making sure the sides were well glazed also. The only problem was that because the sides weren't prefectly straight, the glaze, which is unforgiving and shows any imperfections, was uneven here. The top was just fine and boy was it shiny.

After the glaze set a bit I wrote Happy Birthday Steven with royal icing and I was done.

If I had to do it all again I would not use a ganache for this cake because when it set it was just too stiff for the light cake and cream and slicing was difficult. A buttercream would have worked out better. We enjoyed it nonetheless and even had seconds.

Happy Easter!