Birthday Cake Fit for a Best Friend

Monday is my best friend's birthday! He's turning 25... wow... so we're celebrating, but in a low key kinda way. I've kind of hijacked making his birthday cakes for the last couple years (last year was Deanna Troi, the year before was a Pokemon ball... before that I forget, but maybe I didn't make it that year). This year is a more "grown up" cake, no theme, just flavour fusion! So I made him this chocolate peanut butter marble cake from Sugar Plum, and topped it with some makeshift chocolate buttercream.

This cake was just plain fun to make. It helped a lot that I now have two mixer bowls for my KitchenAid, since it called for a base batter to be split in half, one flavoured with melted chocolate chips, and the other with peanut butter (hehe, you can see the jar in the background). I may have tasted a little more peanut butter batter than was necessary... but... it was so delicious.

You can see on the left how the cake looked before I marbled it. You just plop big globs of cake into the pan and sort of tilt it around to make sure it doesn't leave any gaps. It kind of looks like a globe to me... I wish I'd thought to do that for an Earth Day cake, with blue and green batter, minus the marbelizing. The right is obviously the top view, which is still pretty cool.

I don't have a recipe exactly for the buttercream I used. It's roughly a cup of butter, a cup of melted chocolate chips, and maybe 5 cups of icing sugar? I was really just winging it until I got the consistency I wanted and a good chocolate flavour. Tinting it black was pretty annoying... it was just grey for the longest time, but then I left it for an hour or so and came back to black icing!

This is always my favourite moment in a birthday party! Hope they made a wish!

The cake was delicious, a real crowd pleaser! We were sharing the celebration with our friends Dee and Os, since Os and Andrew share a birthday, and unknowingly I helped quell one of Dee's pregnancy cravings! So this cake was a winner all around. And it looked great once sliced up, which really is the mark of a good marble cake isn't it?

So my verdict on this cake? Fabulous. The only thing I'd do is add a bit more milk next time, to make the batter a bit easier to work with. But it is definitely a cake fit for a best friend. Oh... and before I forget...

Happy Birthday Andrew! Here's to 25 more fabulous years of celebrating together. Love you!