Happy Birthday Mark & Helene!

Easter weekend was wonderful this year! It was our first time hosting the entire family (us two, Mark & Helene, Mom & Dad) over a holiday weekend. It was great having everyone together again, we hadn't seen M & H since our wedding week! Another added bonus of having everyone together was getting to celebrate M & H's birthdays in person. Mark's is April 10 and Helene's is the 12th, which makes them easy to remember and twice as much fun! I texted Mark earlier in the week to ask if Helene had any favorite flavor combos (he will eat anything so I knew he would like whatever I made!) and he suggested raspberries with dark or white chocolate - YUM! I have never made a cake with fruit filling so I figured now was as good a time as any. I began searching online and ended up doing a combination of two recipes. I used the cake and frosting recipe from a post I found on Tasty Kitchen. I created the raspberry filling and garnish based on this recipe. Long story short, I love baking but I like to keep things simple. The cake recipe from Tasty Kitchen was a doctored cake mix (still tasted darn good to me) and the ganache was a simple chocolate melted with Cool Whip that I had already done for another recipe and knew it was impossible to screw up! Anyway, here are the results:

Yummy raspberry filling!

The cake was incredibly moist and I doubled the ganache recipe to make it extra thick and fudgy - a smalllllll slice was more than enough to feed my sweet tooth! ;) The most time consuming aspect of this recipe was straining the raspberries through a fine mesh strainer. I'm wondering, did I not puree them enough before straining, or is it just a laborious task? I felt like i was standing there pressing it through with a spatula forever. Any suggestions? I think it's true in baking that sometimes to make something a little extra special takes a little extra TLC and maybe that is the case with this raspberry filling because it sure did taste amazing!

Be back soon with Dorie Greenspan's famous World Peace Cookies, and yes, they are that good!