Cake for the Princess!

I've gotten into a bit of a habit of making birthday cakes for co-worker's lately. Today is Kim's birthday, and she's not let me forget it. I planned her cake for a while but in the end let the Great Cooking Spirit lead the way when it came to decorating it.

This is one of the first cakes I've made with the cake rings I bought with Dad in Mexico last year, and I have to say I'm not sure what took me so long to put them to good use. Since I knew I would be traveling this past weekend I assembled the cake and filling last week and froze them so all I needed to do was finishing touches last night.

I've also learned the art of baking a standard cake mix cake in two 1/2 sheet pans to creats ultra thin layers. This cake consisted of alternating layers of chocolate cake, raspberry whipped cream, white vanilla cake and more raspberry whipped cream. I had 4 chocolate layers and 3 white layers, so with the filling it looked like 13 layers of varying color. Alas, since I'm still new at this blog thing I didn't think to take a picture of the layers.

I decided to use ganache for a glaze over the frozen cake and then to decorate the top with fresh raspberries. I really like the recipe I tried for the ganache glaze, but it was pretty thin still for piping. Next time I'd make a bit stiffer ganache to pipe. Also, I'd consider piping a ganache border around the top of the cake before filling it in with strawberries.

At any rate, the cake was a hit at work, and the Princess was very happy. Unfortunately I found out there are 3 more birthdays this month! What to do, what to do?