Meet the B-day Girl Who Made This Cake

Obachan's home-made B-Day cake. Girl?... Mmmm... Well, never mind. :P No, no. My birthday dinner hasn't started yet. I'm (more precisely, my electric rice cooker is) cooking rice at the moment, and as soon as it's ready, I'm going to make my favorite temari-zushi for this special dinner tonight. Then I'll indulge in the hedonistic pleasure of sushi, sparkling wine and chocolate cake. And before I destroy the temporary beauty of my home-made birthday cake, I've got to share it with the whole world. Again, it's a home-made cake. I baked it myself. This is my very first chocolate cake with chocolate coating, and I even tried tempering! Even though I couldn't slice the cocoa sponge evenly, and tempering without using a cooking thermometer was a ridiculous attempt, and I forgot to remove the chocolate-coated cake from the wire rack before decorating it with all these toppings (the cake was glued to the wire rack with the chocolate), and one end of the ribbon scraped off some cocoa powder from the surface while I was trying to tie it -- I insist that this is a success, BECAUSE IT'S MY B-DAY AND I NEED TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT MY ACHIEVEMENT! And honestly, the cocoa sponge, or should I call it chocolate genoise? is E X C E L L E N T. This is the recipe & instruction (in Japanese) by a charisma(?) Japanese wife living in Chicago. Just as so many reviewers have mentioned, I'm so happy that I found this recipe! Yeah, this recipe IS a great B-day present for me, honestly. I'll post a photo of the cross-section of my cake, if I succeed in cutting out a piece gracefully. :) Maybe I am gifted -- not in cooking or baking, but in being able to feel happiness in little things. About US$9 sparkling wine, US$3 small bouquet and home-baked 15 cm chocolate cake with small candles from 1 dollar shop. And emails to me and comments on my blog from my friends all over the world ... These are what I have on my birthday, and they all make me so happy. (Oh, I just realized that I didn't mention the temari-zushi. That's because the sliced fish were leftovers from the previous meal, thus not included in the things I bought specifically for this B-day dinner.) :) But next time I'm going to make a cake with more cream and more fruits. I liked this simple design, but taste-wise, I would love a lot more fruits buried in a thick layer of cream. Oh, and the next time I'm NOT going to sprinkle cocoa powder on the chocolate coating of the birthday cake. When I blew out the candles... Imagine what happened. Categories: Sweets, Japanese, Miscellaneous