Our family friend Claire turned 18 and celebrated with family and friends (pre-COVID-19, obviously). I was so happy to get to make a cake for her. She shared some of her interests and hobbies - rock climbing, writing - but I really wanted the cake to be beautiful and elegant, so I got her permission to surprise her with something very pretty. It just had to be chocolate and large enough to feed everyone (it was a 12" cake, which feeds a small horde).
I am often inspired by the work Melissa does over at My Cake School. She has a tutorial for a beautiful cake with carved ganache piping and I decided to try my hand at that skill.
Ganache is really fun to work with. It's simple in terms of ingredients - just heated cream and chopped chocolate - and can be made to varying degrees of thickness depending upon your ratio and intended use. The internet is full of good explanations about the proprortions... here's one. When you are making something with very few ingredients, it's important to use high quality ingredients. I actually really like Trader Joe's pound plus bars, but you can really go all out with high-end chocolate, and it will yield a silky, rich, delicious ganache.
For Claire's cake, I made my usual chocolate cake filled with buttermilk chocolate frosting, and I crumb coated it with the frosting and let it set. Then I covered the cake with ganache, which gave it a really smooth outer surface. I think I used a 2:1 chocolate:cream ratio and controlled for thickness by letting it sit at room temperature until it still had some movement to it, but was spreadable, and could be applied without just sliding off the cake. After the cake was covered, I chilled it for a bit. With the cake cold, the piping would take form easily and set up a bit, which allowed me to carve it. If the ganache is too soft, it will pipe beautifully but not be carveable. (More on that later; my cake was probably too cold. Also: I don't usually chill ganache-covered cakes because they lose the shine of the chocolate. So I should probably have heeded my own advice and just let it sit at room temp a little longer.)
I used medium and large round piping tips of various sizes to pipe flowers and swirls and lines and dots. It was sort of random, and I am not sure if I should have planned out my decorations a little better. I just picked a spot and started, and then I tried to vary the sizes and shapes of the flowers/swirls and fit them in next to each other.
Once I had piped all the decorations, I went back with some carving tools to add definition. Maybe the ganache was too firm or too cold at that point, but I was not a big fan of how it was looking when I carved it, so I did not go too far with carving. You'll see that some of the flowers and swirls have lines carved into them, or depth carved around the edges, and others don't. Next time I will experiment with the ganache being just a touch softer and see if it carves more easily. It certainly looked pretty on Melissa's cake. (I also really like the tall, double-barrel cakes she usually makes; I love the look of the decorations cascading down the sides of the cake, but with a 4-5" tall cake, you just don't have enough leeway to make that work.)
I was supposed to make a similar cake for Claire's mom's 50th birthday celebration this spring, but sadly, it was postponed due to quarantine. Hopefully, she will do a big 51st party and we can celebrate then. Claire loved her special 18th birthday cake, and I'm so happy it was as beautiful and lovely as she is!
Piped ornamental flowers on the top to give it some height and visual appeal.
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