birthday tradition

For as long as I can remember, we have celebrated my mother's birthday, not with cake, but with a stack of Hostess cupcakes arranged on a plate, usually with candles.  I don't really know why.  My dad doesn't bake, so that could have something to do with it.  Or maybe it's because we were so often at my parents' lake house around her birthday since it's one of the first nice-weather weekends of the season... and packaged cupcakes are easy and travel well.  Plus, my mom loves chocolate.

Whatever the reason, I have lots of fond memories of scurrying into the master bedroom of the lake house to covertly arrange the cupcakes on a dinner plate.  Like Mom didn't know what was going on!

Last year, I found a recipe on smitten kitchen that could help me to duplicate, in a homemade fashion, the birthday cupcakes.  I didn't find it in time to do it for Mom's birthday, but I made both the cake and the filling/frosting for a multi-birthday celebration at my in-laws' Memorial Day BBQ.  It was too delicious not to do the whole thing in all its cupcakey glory.

So this year, I volunteered to be in charge of Mom's birthday cupcakes... provided my baby would let me have enough free time to bake, fill, and frost this amazing cake.  It sounds exquisitely complicated: from-scratch moist chocolate cake, hollowed out to house a creamy center, glazed with a decadent chocolate ganache.  Fortunately for this new mommy, each step is deceptively simple.

The part I don't have a picture of is the best: the end product opened up, which looks exactly like a Hostess cupcake would if it were 10" in diameter and had been bitten into.  The creamy center oozes out, and you get a bit of each component of the cake in every bite.

But here is the end result:

(The signature swirls looked perfect before I
covered the cake with plastic wrap for the ride over...
the swirls wanted to stick to the plastic.)

My sister and I couldn't find where Mom hides the candles, so we were stuck with a single one that fell out of the cabinet we were searching.  As I carried the cake into the living room and we all started singing "Happy Birthday," Mom exclaimed, "Where are my cupcakes?!"  The look on her face when she saw the swirls was extremely satisfying.

For me, this signifies my return to cake, being a bakist, pastry chefdom... all that has been missing since I had a baby.  Coming soon: my niece's first birthday, Father's Day, and the 4th of July!