My sons' evolving preferences over the years have me confronting increasingly challenging trials in birthday cake-decorating. In fact this is the first year that I completely failed him on that account. It would have been so much easier to just pick up a cake from a bakery but I take birthday cakes very seriously and what I lack in decorating talent as well as punctuality, I make up for with the sheer determination to make my kids birthday cakes that they will remember throughout the year.
But despite my best intentions, I just couldn't deliver this time: there I was at 4 a.m., just having finished frosting a 2-layer 9x13" cake, struggling to 'draw' Ben 10 with tinted buttercream, and failing. Miserably. An hour, and several errors later, I gave up and scraped the offensive Ben 10 figure off, replacing it with candy cake decorations. I then dropped it off at the school, sending up a prayer that the cake itself would appeal to my picky sons' taste buds.
Once he got home from school, I was rewarded with the very rare compliment that 'everything about the cake was so, so delicious' as well as a request to make it again over the weekend. The second time around, I decided to keep it simple and made a 2-layer 9-inch cake. It took us a couple of days to eat through it, and it seemed that the flavors just intensified the longer this cake sat around in the fridge.
The cake recipe can be found on Gourmet here.
The brown sugar cream cheese frosting is a twist on the classic cream cheese frosting and is one of my favorites ways to frost cupcakes. It comes from Joy the Baker and it paired so well with the chocolate in the cake, that I may never use any other kind of frosting ever again!
