For many people, the month of June is a sign that there are months of warmer weather ahead. For kids, school ends and summer begins, parents are at their busiest. But for me, it’s all that and more because June is also my birth month. This year, we celebrated a little early and I, once again, made my own cake.

For those of you that are curious, you can read this post about the cake I baked myself last year. It wasn’t a Magnolia Bakery recipe. I decided to make a decadent-looking cake from Sally’s Baking Addiction. This year, however, I did make a recipe out the MBC, and let me tell you: it was everything I needed in life at that moment.

Deciding on the Cake

This took some time for me, as it usually does. At first, I was entranced by another cake off of Sally’s website. But eventually, I decided to knock off another recipe off the MBC list. Then came the somewhat difficult part: deciding which cake recipe to make. While I’ve gone through a few of the cakes in the MBC so far, there are still many others. Eventually, I settled on the winner: The Razzy Cake.

It’s a chocolate cake with raspberry jam, white chocolate meringue buttercream frosting. How good does that sound? And let me tell you, once it was ready to eat, it was one of the best things I’ve ever made. But, getting to the end result was not exactly easy.

Making the Cake

I endeavored to bake the cake on Saturday evening, a whole day before I needed it. I knew it would be fine on the counter over night as long as it was wrapped well. Nothing out of the ordinary happened while mixing the ingredients. And I used pans that I always used in the past. But for some reason, the cake batter overflowed both pans and caused a huge mess in the oven!

Thankfully, my mother helped me clean it up. But I decided that these pans would no longer suffice. Another time I baked this cake using these pans, the same thing happened. Luckily I had the foresight to set the cake pans on a cookie sheet to bake. So the mess wasn’t nearly as bad! Since I needed new cake pans, I found myself at Walmart at almost 7:30 on a Saturday night spending nearly $20 on two new 9-inch cake pans.

The next morning, I woke up early and made the cake again. It was out of the oven and cooling on the counter faster than you could say “messy oven.”

Making the Frosting

The next step in the process was to make the meringue frosting. I was a little hesitant about this because other times I’ve made meringue buttercream it put my poor old Kitchenaid mixer on life support. However, this time things tended to move more smoothly. I think it was because I only made 2/3 of a regular batch. This was also much quicker than other attempts. I also had some helping hands to assist in the process.

Once the frosting base was made, I had to add in the mix-ins to make the proper flavor. For this recipe that meant melted and cooled white chocolate and raspberry jam. I decided early on to strain the seeds from the jam for the frosting since who wants to deal with seeds in frosting?

But, I ran into some issues with the white chocolate. Apparently the white chocolate I originally purchased wasn’t made with cocoa butter. This caused the product to not melt properly. Thankfully, my chemist boyfriend helped solved the puzzle and ran down to the local grocery store to get the proper type of chocolate. Lindt to the rescue and let me tell you: I think the expensive chocolate made all the difference in the world! Maybe Ina Garten is on to something.

I added the melted and cooled white chocolate and finished the frosting. After it cooled in the fridge for a little bit to firm up, it was time to assemble and decorate.

Assembling the Cake

Before assembling I had to make one last part of the cake. The chocolate ganache that was supposed to be drizzled over the top and allowed to drip down the sides of the naked cake look. The picture in the MBC looked stunning! And though I knew my cake wouldn’t look like that, I was at least trying to get it as close as possible. Sadly, we were having issues with getting the ganache to cool to the proper temperature so that it would drip properly. We put it in the freezer and started assembling the cake.

Before I knew it, the cake was assembled and decorated and the ganache was still in the freezer. I decided I would just swap the ganache to the fridge and make truffles at a later time. Did you know that ganache can stay in the fridge, covered for about a month? So much time to deal with it. I wasn’t concerned.

Eating It

At around 3:30 in the afternoon, it was finally (!) time to slice into the cake. The cake was light and moist (which tends to be the case with the MB Chocolate Cake recipe). I’ve eaten this cake many times before and to be honest, I’m only starting to get tired of it.

What made this cake stand out the most was the frosting. The white chocolate and raspberry buttercream is the perfect combination! It’s also one that I don’t have too often. It was nice to have something different for a change.

My only complaint lies in the fact that this cake was extremely delicate. Once it was sliced, it would fall over. This could have been because of the of the frosting. As meringue frosting gets warm it because very slippery and weak. A cake that is heavy and moist combined with the weaker frosting can lead to a major disaster! Luckily for us, the cake didn’t last too long out of the fridge and disaster was avoided! I think next time I need to make this cake, I’ll put the layers in the freezer for a bit before working with it. Maybe that will help. I also plan to bake it for a few extra minutes to help dry it out more. I don’t think it’ll make the cake taste dry, it’ll just dry it out a bit and it won’t be as moist or fragile.

Until next time, bake on!