chocolate & clementine 60th birthday cake

One of my best friends’ mom just turned 60 this week and naturally I was in charge of the cake. My instructions were simple: she wanted a big 60 on the cake.

We agreed on a combination of chocolate and clementine (I use my own home-made marmalade for this) and a design similar to the 50th birthday cake I made a couple of weeks ago, so once again I went with my chocolate cake, ganache and buttercream recipes, and used the leftover egg yolks to whip up a quick pastry cream that was flavored with clementine:

• 4 egg yolks
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 2 tbsp corn starch
• 200 gr chocolate
• 3 tbsp clementine marmalade

This results in a very thick custard, which is what you want when layering such a heavy cake.

I alternated between layers – 2 were filled with the custard, with a buttercream border piped around the sides and 3 were filled with chocolate ganache over a thin layer of marmalade. Then I crumb coated the cake with the rest of the ganache and added a final layer of buttercream all over.

The decorations are, much like the 50th birthday cake, shards of tempered chocolate and fondant colored orange (rather than the shards of caramel I used in the previous one) to mirror the citrus flavor inside. The numbers on top are rice crispy treats covered in chocolate and orange fondant.

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I watch copious amounts of TV and write about it. I also watch movies and am ridiculously addicted to cooking shows.

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