This was my baking project this weekend.  I made it for a member of the board of governers at the hospital I work at for her birthday.  The administrative assistant for the CEO approached me last week to make this cake.  I asked her what flavors she would like and she told me I should decide.  I made a tiramisu cake, so I hope the lucky recepient likes coffee. 

The cake part itself is Rose’s biscuit de savioe baked in two 8 x 2 inch pans, which I then split in half, so I had 4 layers of cake.  I used the tiramisu filling and expresso simple syrup recipes from Rose’s tiramisu recipe in RHC.  ( The only change I made was I added 2 1/2 tsps of gelatin to the filling so that it would be firm enough to slice ).

I used mocha mousseline buttercream to ice the cake and then sprinkled cocoa on top.  And yay!!! my tempered chocolate band worked. 

She wanted me to write happy birthday on the cake.  I hate writing on cakes.  So I made a chocolate plaque and tried to write on that.  My writing was just as bad.  I took one of my antique postcards and cut it out to fit the chocolate plaque.  I glued parchment paper to the back of the postcard with white chocolate and then glued that to the chocolate plaque.  So all she has to do is take the postcard and parchment paper off and she can eat the chocolate plaque if she wants to.  The roses around the bottom of the cake are white chocolate.

The pictures aren’t that great.  The lighting is not very good in my kitchen at night.

omg liza !!! thats gorgeous !!

It looks great!  Love the height on it and the way the postcard turned out!  I’m with you—shaky handwriting can spoil the whole effect, so it’s good you went with a whole different approach.

Liza, congratulations on that beautiful chocolate band.  It looks so shiny you must have tempered it perfectly!

The cake sounds delicious, I haven’t made the RHC tiramisu in a while, but after seeing yours I’ll have to think about doing it again.

I’m with you on the writing, I’ve never done it on a cake.  You came up with an elegant solution.

How did you make the pretty white chocolate roses?

The cake looks perfect, you are sure to be getting rave reviews!

Liza, that is beautiful, and the flavors sound fabulous!  Yes, indeed, how did you make the roses out of white chocolate???????  Did you add extra cocoa butter to thicken it for piping and stability???  They are sooooo pretty!

Love it!

Thanks everyone for the compliments!  The white chocolate roses were made with a silicone mold.  Just melt the chocolate, place the mold in the freezer and voila - instant roses.  I didn’t have any gumpaste made to make sugar flowers ( nor the time to make them ), so these were my next best option.  I think they dressed up the cake nicely.

Wow! They sure did! And they all look different, so it worked just fabooooooo!!!

What a beautiful job you did! Thanks for the idea of the card w/ parchment for writing. I, too hate writing on cakes since I don’t do it enough to have any confidence when I do.
Great job, girl. Hope they appreciated and savored both it’s beauty and it’s deliciousness!

Thank-you Kyle.  Yes, my writing skills on cakes are really bad.  I personally like the look of a special occasion cake without any writing. But that is just my humble opinion.

Hopefully the birthday girl enjoyed the cake.  I left work before they had it yesterday.  But I will find out this afternoon when I go in for my afternoon shift.

I actually baked two sets of cakes because I wasn’t happy with the first two that I did.  So I made a few small tiramisu trifles in my ramekins with the left over cake, filling and expresso syrup.  It tasted pretty darn good.

I personally like the look of a special occasion cake without any writing.

Unless we can get Bill to come over and do it!!! 

I scraped the last cake I wrote on.  It was so cute, and then I wrote on it, and it was so dumb looking.

I think this cake is absolutely beautiful.  Great idea with the card!

LOL…thanks for the compliment…but not all of mine come out perfectly.  I don’t post the bad ones.  One trick is:  Do the writing before the rest of the decorating, that way when it isn’t centered you can use some flowers or other decorations to make the top of the cake look balanced.

Oh, Bill, great tip! Thanks!

Bill, I think you have the most lovely pennmanship for writing on cakes.  ( Bad pennmanship must only apply to physicians and surgeons - NOT dentists ) LOL!!!

Liza, that is a beautiful cake. It looks so much like a cake from a fancy bakery, really - except I know this one would taste so much better. The chocolate band looks so perfect and smooth. How do you get it to be so?