Devil's Food Cake with Midnight Ganache

It was my dad's birthday yesterday, so I made him a cake! 

This is the first pastry/dessert/baked-good I've made with alcohol in it. I soaked dried cherries in Cognac for a solid 6 hours, which I used for the filling.

The ganache turned out really well, and was the perfect amount too! Not too little and not too much; just right. I guess it's called "Midnight Ganache" because it has two chocolate-y parts, and caramelized sugar and cream. And I used super super dark chocolate so I guess that also added more of "midnight" taste.

Maybe it's supposed to be obvious, but I didn't realize until yesterday that the "Devil's Food Cake" is really the opposite of "Angel's Food Cake" aside from the name. Angel's food cake is supposed to be really light and fluffy (with more egg whites than yolks), while the Devil's Food Cake is really rich and dense (more egg yolks than whites too), and with this one specifically - helllla chocolate.


Decorating cakes is not one of my fortes. I It's something I've been trying to improve on, and I think I did a pretty good job this time! Instead of writing it directly on the cake, I decided to write out "Happy Birthday" in white chocolate on parchment paper so if I messed up I could always do it again until it looked right. Luckily I only had to write it out once; I think it looked pretty decent. I made some random squiggles and shapes just to use up the rest of the white chocolate, and just let it dry.

 The pieces were really fragile, so the "happy birthday" is actually "Hap" "py" "birth" "day" because the pieces broke when I tried to put it on. oops. But it's okay! :D it's not really noticeable.