A Cake for a Birthday Boy

It was Emmett's birthday last week and we celebrated this weekend. He's a lover of all things chocolate, so I decided to do a chocolate cake. Eleanor told me that he'd want sprinkles (either that or a blue cake), so here we are. It was totally delish.

I used my Sheet Cake recipe in 2 layer pans, reducing the oven temp to 350F and increasing the cooking time to 30 mins.

For the frosting, I did a classic ganache:

• 1.5c heavy/whipping cream
• 16oz bittersweet chocolate, grated

We're pretty limited with our choc choices due to Emmett's peanut allergy, so I used choc chips, whizzing them in the food processor to break them up a bit.

Bring the cream to a boil and take off the heat. Dump your grated chocolate in there, stir until mostly dissolved and cover for 10 mins. Stir well until smooth. Now you can choose how to use it. You can pour it as a thin glaze at this point, or let it cool to the desired consistency to either do a thick, poured glaze or a spreadable frosting. Mine was somewhere in the middle. This made a LOT of ganache. Enough to fill and frost this cake with a fair bit leftover for eating with spoons. What's nice is that it's not very sweet so it is a good foil to a typical choc cake.