another birthday cake

I made another birthday cake, this time for Mike, using a similar recipe to "yellow cake with chocolate frosting" just below. This time, I filled the cake with seedless raspberry preserves, and used a different frosting recipe, courtesy Martha Stewart. Overall the cake was really good, but I wasn't 100% into the frosting. I'm not a frosting lover, though; so often buttercream-style frosting is too fatty, too sugary, too much. This frosting contains three sticks of butter, and nearly a pound of chocolate! Now that's decadent.

I would have tried a ganache, but Mike liked the sound of a buttercream. Actually, Martha S.'s ganache recipe sounds a little flabby too. Two and a half cups is a lot of heavy cream. Maybe a chocolate glaze is the ticket.

Really, what I want to try is a 7-minute frosting, light and fluffy. I've never tried it before, but it seems completely unlike a fat-based frosting. Maybe a chocolate cake, with heaps of feather-light vanilla icing. . . .

Still, a tasty cake. I'm going on and on about the issue of frosting, but it was lovely and delicious, and I'm coming to rely on the yellow cake recipe below. It's a keeper. Happy Birthday Mike! I love making birthday cakes.