Happy Birthday to You and You and You and You... and me... Gobble Gobble

On my mother’s side of the family alone, we have 9 November birthdays – 5 of which are in the same week as Thanksgiving.  

• Aunty Theresa
• Uncle Dave
• Uncle Chris
• Nephew Logan
• Aunty Ellen
• Cousin Crystal
• Cousin Lawrence
• Myself
• Nephew Aidan

My family asked me to make a November Birthday cake to bring to Thanksgiving so we could celebrate the birthdays as well as the day of giving thanks.  Since I’ve been busy filling cake orders for other people’s celebrations, I was psyched to make my own design this time around.  At the same time I needed to keep in mind that this cake was for kids, adults, males and females so I kept it fairly generic.  If I didn’t work full time, I would have loved to make individual components that captured each birthday person’s personality – but I just didn’t have the time to make it “that special” with a full time job, a new baby at home and opposite working hours of my husband

I made both cake pops and cake and I love the way it turned out in the end.  The cake pops were a hit – easy to grab as someone walked by, and super delicious.  Another bonus is that I was really able to get to know my new toy/birthday gift as well and used it for the entire cut outs on the cake.

Needless to say, after our Thanksgiving feast, pie, appetizers and cake pops no one had any room for cake so we cut it up and sent some home with every family.  I made ganache to cover the cake with (under the fondant), and made sure to put a thick layer of the ganache on the cake as most people are not fond of fondant (no pun intended).  YUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMM!  I am a true chocolate lover and have a huge craving for dark, semi-sweet uber rich chocolate.   Let me tell you – this ganache was just that – heavenly!  I’m happy to have some left over in my freezer for either future cakes or ganache truffles or something.  My mouth is watering just thinking about it…

I’ve been really busy between cake orders, holidays, birthdays, full time job, baby and husband and I am really looking forward to a short “cake break” this week/weekend.  Although, I’m not entirely sure I will take the whole week off from caking…

Thanks for reading,

Tam a Lam