I used to come home every year on my birthday to find a slow-motion disaster unfolding in my kitchen. Cabinets ajar, cat panicked, kids counter-surfing, my wife dusted in flour. The goal of all this chaos? To bake me a birthday cake.
This annual fiasco was a product of my own doing. The other 364 days of the year, I’m the one doing all of the baking and cooking in my household, and as someone who runs a test kitchen, it is possible I have a hard time letting go of what takes place in my own kitchen. So I faced the problem head-on and I worked with my colleague Kat Boytsova on Bon Appétit’s Easiest Chocolate Birthday Cake. My family has made it ever since, and peace has reigned on my birthday.
It was only recently that I figured out a way to make it even easier.
The frosting for that particular chocolate cake recipe is great, but it requires some patience. Kat uses a ganache, a mixture of melted chocolate and cream, that needs to cool down and firm up before it can be combined with cream cheese and sugar and whipped into an airy frosting. Fantastic! But slow.
I needed a frosting that could get beaten, spread, and served within minutes—one my wife and kids could have cleaned up before I crossed the threshold.
Enter this speedy chocolate cream cheese frosting. The base of softened butter and cream cheese gives it maximum volume and stability. A hefty amount of melted chocolate (that doesn’t need to be cooled down) and Dutch-process cocoa powder adds an assertive bittersweet note that’s balanced by floral vanilla extract.
I usually take 80% of the frosting off whatever baked goods I eat, since most are invariably too sweet. This is different. Unlike one-dimensional American buttercream, this cake topper has a pleasant zip. It celebrates the savory side of chocolate with a mousse-like floofiness. And it means I can go back to spending my birthday not worrying about cake, just enjoying it.
