Happy Birthday, Dad!

I love family birthdays.  It means that I can make a cake, and that generally I can make whatever design I want.  Sometimes inspiration is instant and other times I like to browse photos and recipes.  For my Dad's big birthday party, inspiration was there before the party was announced, as this was an idea I've been wanting to try for months...

Chocolate Fortress Cake

The bottom tier is the now-famous banana cake with caramelized bananas in between the layers and the top tier is a four layer vanilla cake with strawberry filling and frosting.  Normally I would have added to the theme the walls were advocating and made this a chocolate extravaganza with dark chocolate mocha cake and gooey caramel filling, but there are so many allergies to deal with I had to stay away from chocolate.  At least this way Mom could just pull the slab of chocolate off her piece and enjoy her cake, sans hives.

I wasn't exactly sure quite how to put it together, so I started with icing both tiers and stacking them together (despite the very tippy top tier) before applying chocolate.  I poured the chocolate a day or two before and then cut it into the sizes needed after I had iced the cakes. I used melted chocolate as glue wherever necessary. Unfortunately, my brain wasn't working quite right while I was cutting and the lines didn't match up.  So I just pretended I meant for them to not line up.

I built the walls around the top tier first and tried to fix the seams in the walls with melted chocolate, but it was a little too thin and kept just dripping down the sides.  The beauty of chocolate construction is that surplus building supplies just get drizzled on any open surface, covering imperfections in the craftsmanship.  In the end I cut a lid from excess sheet chocolate for the top tier, but the visible top of the bottom tier just had any extra melted chocolate randomly applied to it.

Needless to say, there was way too much cake.  We were eating it at home for a week, and that was even after taking some of the leftovers to work...  But too much cake is better than not enough!  And it was a fun experiment that was enjoyed by all.  Even those who didn't realize it was the cake, and thought it was just a giant candle or some sort of centerpiece on the food table.  But why have a wax centerpiece when you could have a chocolate one?

- Carolyn