I’m going to squeeze every last bit of clout out of the birthday cake that I made this year because it took me a long time and I’m proud of it! I made every element completely from scratch, adjusting recipes to suit the flavors I had chosen. Read more about how I pulled off this feat:
The Inspo
I follow tons of cake makers on Instagram and have had a folder of yummy looking cakes saved that I combed through as the starting point for my cake. I divided a notebook page into four sections: cake, icing, filling, and decorations, and wrote down any and every flavor that came to mind or that I saw on Instagram that sounded yummy to me. Once I had filled up the page, I noted which flavors I gravitated toward and constructed some cake ideas. I ended up with: earl grey cake, pistachio frosting, some sort of citrus curd filling, and miso pine nut caramel shards.
The Shopping
I love specialty grocery stores, so I used this cake project as an excuse to hit a few all in a day. My first stop was Sheridan Fruit Co, a place I had dreamed of going since I was little. I picked up blood oranges, meyer lemons, pistachios, pine nuts, and dried apricots there. I also stopped into Wellspent (I got some Fishwife tinned salmon and tarragon mustard, nothing cake-related!), Montelupo (scored some pistachio butter for the buttercream), and Providore (got some real English earl grey tea, and Omsom yuzu sauce, kewpie mayo, and shortbread cookies, lol).
The Making
The night before my birthday, I made the decorations for my cake: caramel shards and sugared rosemary. Working off of that basic caramel recipe, I melted a teeny tiny spoonful (maybe a 1/2 or even 1/4 teaspoon, if I had measured) of miso into the simmering water. Once the caramel had darkened in the pot, I poured it onto a prepared tray to solidify and added the toasted pine nuts to the top while it was still wet. When it solidified, I roughly chopped the sheet of caramel with a knife to make the shard shapes. The sugared rosemary was easy, I just dipped the rosemary in water, rolled it in sugar, and left it to dry on the sheet with the caramel.
I had a difficult time making the curd. I intended to use blood orange curd as the filling of my cake because there is orange in earl grey tea and I thought the flavors would complement each other. I used Ina Garten’s recipe because I trust her, but I had never made curd before and it ended up being way too liquid-y to use. It’s still in my fridge in a jar. I am scared of it.
On the day of my birthday, I made the cake and frosting and assembled/decorated. I used the King Arthur birthday cake recipe and steeped about 8 bags of earl grey tea in the milk the recipe called for before adding it to the rest of the ingredients. I’m not sure if I’d use this recipe again, the cakes ended up being really dense, more like a tea loaf than a light, crumby birthday layer cake. But the tea flavor was really potent, exactly what I was hoping for. I ended up just using my mom’s recipe for basic buttercream, and added about 1/2 cup of pistachio butter to the creamed butter before incorporating the powdered sugar. It was absolutely delicious, and I will be making pistachio buttercream again. I ended up using the buttercream in between the two layers, as well as all over the top and sides.
The Final Product
I’m so proud of this cake! I think it looks beautiful and the strong tea and pistachio flavors really came through and were highlighted by the toasty nuttiness of the miso pine nut caramel and herbiness of the rosemary (although the rosemary was mostly just for decoration). I want to go even crazier with the decorations and incorporate piping next time, and keep tweaking the base cake recipe so I can confidently iterate on it. There is definitely more cake-making in my future.