the great ganache debacle (2013 ed.)

Yesterday, a friend celebrated his 30th birthday with a potluck dinner. He asked me to bring the birthday cake, and I agreed! Foolishly, perhaps, given my travel schedule and inexperience with making birthday cakes. It was to be a vanilla sponge cake filled with coffee/Bailey's flavored whipped cream:

 Ready to be refrigerated, before the final step of covering with chocolate ganache.

I had thought that the ganache would be the easy part. If you thought that making chocolate ganache consists of dumping chocolate and cream in a pot and melting them together, I can now tell you from experience that you'd be wrong. The ganache was oily and refused to be spread; it somehow was simultaneously dragging too much on the surface and too slippery. I called every number I knew to reach my mom: cake emergency! I managed to scrape off the failed ganache, leaving this beautiful masterpiece:

Mmmmm...delicious....

 

The leftover scrapings. My mom told me to save it to use later. Ideas, anyone?

Sidenote: I include these pictures because I wish that food bloggers would show us more failures and mistakes. Not just epic Pinterest fails, as amusing as they are, but more run-of-the-mill mistakes. Otherwise, how are we to know how to recover? Fortunately, I have the ultimate resource in my mom. =) Still, I got so stressed out that I got failed ganache all over the kitchen. I was rather proud of myself when I looked down and saw that I had managed to avoid getting ganache on the front of my new yellow t-shirt...until I realized that I had succeeded in smearing it all over my BACK. Still not entirely sure how that happened.

It's a good thing that the cake's surface was meant to be covered up! That meant that I could try again, this time with better technique (steam the cream first in the microwave, add the chocolate, let set and then stir occasionally) and consequently, better results:

 Special thanks to Julie for the beautiful cake server!

People seemed to enjoy the cake, and I gained some valuable experience. I'll just have to keep practicing, I guess!