So, in addition to singing and drawing and stuff one of my favorite things to do is bake! Cookies, pies, tarts, cupcakes, cakes, whatever, but I particularly love to make a good cake, and relish the opportunity whenever it presents itself. The only problem is there are only three people in my house, and of those only two of us would actually cake on a regular basis. So really the only time I get to bake something exceptionally fun is around birthdays and holidays. Luckily such an opportunity recently presented itself in the form of my very own birthday! (26, yay!)

Even though it’s kind of against the rules of common sense when you’re going to be serving food to people (birthday party guests in this case), I always kind of like to try out something new when I bake my birthday cake. So, instead of going for a standard sort of thing I knew would be good, I wanted to try something fresh. In this case fresh was a cherry cordial inspired cake.

Luckily, despite the fact that it was a brand new recipe the cake turned out quite well! I used a one-bowl chocolate cake recipe I found online and tweaked it a little bit to my personal tastes (butter not vegetable oil, buttermilk instead of regular milk etc.) then added a bunch of tart red cherries. The result was really nothing short of delicious.

Originally I had planned to use a fudge frosting, but after making it up I found I didn’t like the texture at all, and that it was, in my opinion, a little too rich for an all over frosting. Not wanting to waste it though, I ended up using the fudge between the layers and a lighter chocolate buttercream to frost the outside. In retrospect, the fudge was just too rich, and if I made the cake again I’d probably leave it out and only use the chocolate buttercream. Even so, the entire thing was gone a day later, so I can only surmise that it was delicious. And beautiful too!