Finally 21 Cake

When the kids you have been watching turn suddenly 21 right in front of you, what can you do? Well, I looked at the situation, thought long and hard, had sleepless nights and made a “Finally 21 Cake”.

Couple of weeks ago, my friend’s kid – I mean boy, was turning 21 and she asked if I could make a cake to surprise him. I just started practicing the cakes on my own pace and this friend put lot of faith in me to surprise her boy on his big day in front of 50 people. Uffh, suddenly I felt old for such a big responsibility. I just rolled up my sleeves and got to work.

I wanted to personalize it as per his tastes. But didnt get any luck on the list. What better way to show he is a big boy who can take care of himself and be responsible than by adding a bottle or 2 of booze as cake topper?

Its a 3 layer Vanilla Cake with vanilla buttercream frosting. Chocolate Ganache as the drip, followed by macarons, kisses, chocolate and booze bottles as the cake toppers. The Cake turned out beautifully and got many compliments. More importantly my friend, birthday boy and the entire family loved it. Mission accomplished!!

The cake is once again the Vanilla Cake I have been using forever. And the buttercream is also the same recipe I shared before. But Chocolate Ganache, thats a first time and it definitely made the simple cake more fancy with the drip method. It did take forever to dry though. I might have to work on it a bit.

I started the cake by assembling the layers with light brownish buttercream.

The cake, buttercream and ganache are the super stars of this cake. The cake toppers take it up a notch. I made the cake layers a day before to save on time. The rest are made on the final day.

Vanilla Cake – I doubled the recipe for three 8 inch layers.

I made this vanilla buttercream – doubled the recipe for my 3 layer cake. it was perfectly sufficient. And added the light brown color to match the rest of the chocolatey theme.

And this is the chocolate Ganache recipe. Make sure you leave the ganache for atleast 10 mins before you start dripping. Otherwise it will be ooey gooey mess.

Then came the ganache. The drip bottle was tremendous help and definitely controlled the drip length and curve of the drip.

I sprinkled a bit of edible gold dust on the ganache and let it set for 4-5 hours.

Then came the part of adding the cake toppers of white swirls and ‘Finally 21’ white chocolate which turned out beautiful.

I am not going to lie, the ‘Finally 21’ part was difficult. The font picking, writing with chocolate took lot of time. I made atleast 6-8 toppers before finalizing on the font I like.

The final part was decorating with chocolate, wafers, macarons, kisses and booze bottles.

And more buttercream tips later, Here’s the final version.

Closeup version below.

I added few swirls of buttercream and wafers and chocolate on the side.

This is the top view of the cake.

What do you think of this cake? Let me know your comments or feedback in the comments below. I sure appreciate it.