BIRTHDAY CAKE

This was the cake that I made for my 25th birthday last February. The cake was a flourless chocolate cake with two types of filling, whipped chocolate ganache and cookies & cream. Love it! If I were making a cake for someone else's birthday, my brother/my sister/ my nephew, I would take time to make some decorations but this time, it was for me so I did not bother to decorate it. It came out great! I think from now on I will make more naked cake, I also find it prettier that you can actually see the layers inside :)

I use a flourless chocolate cake recipe from BBC food you can find it here. The filling is a simple whipped milk chocolate ganache. I always prefer to use the milk chocolate instead of the dark one, I like things sweeter. I added another type of filling, cookies & cream because I wanted to add a little crunchy texture to the cake. I made a mistake though, by the time we were eating the cake, the cookies in the cream already softened, so I did not get the texture I wanted. 

So, if you want to have some crunchy cookie texture, I think the best way is to first put a layer of cream and then sprinkle cookie chunks on top of it, to keep the cookies from getting soft. 

As you can see from the picture I did put the cream layers a bit unconventionally. I put them in two piping bags and pipe them alternately with each other. I also added some strawberries, just because :)

I made some macarons because it's my nephews favorite cookie ;) But I did not have time to make the filling, and the filling from the cake was already finished so I just left them filling-less and add it to the cake for some decoration :)

Ingredients

• Milk chocolate ganache
• 100 ml heavy cream
• 150 gr milk chocolate
• 2 tablespoon baileys
• Cookies & cream
• 100 ml cream
• 250 gr mascarpone
• 2 package oreo cookies (300 gr), roughly crushed
• Separate the bigger chunks from the small dusts of the cookies 

Method

• Ganache
• Warm up heavy cream in a sauce pan, when the sides of the pan starts to boil, pour into the chopped chocolate. Let sit for 2 minutes. 
• Stir well until all the chocolate lumps are gone. Transfer to a medium mixing bowl. Let cool to room temperature and then refrigerate for 3 hours
• When the ganache is cold and slightly hard whip until it is fluffy. Add in the baileys and mix well. 
• Cookies & cream
• Whip the cream with a sprinkle of sugar until stiff peaks.
• In another mixing bowl, beat the mascarpone until it is soft and fluffy. This is done to prevent some mascarpone lumps when mixing it with the whipped cream.
• Fold the whipped mascarpone to the whipped cream and mix thoroughly. 
• Add the cookie dusts in the cream and mix well.