My brother's birthday is right around Thanksgiving time, so when we decided to make things easy and order our food from Copeland's, I threw my efforts into doing a birthday cake for dessert. Plus I wanted to give my new cake decorating turn table a spin. Thinking that his favorite candy was Reese's peanut butter cups (more on that later), I went for a triple layer devil's food cake with peanut butter buttercream frosting and featuring the iconic peanut butter cups in their various forms.
I bought a variety pack of miniature cups, in milk, white, and dark chocolate, plus some Thin Reese's cups to get more height on the cake. I also got a mix of peanut butter and chocolate chips, chocolate jimmies, and Reese's pieces, though I didn't end up using the last.
I stacked the cake layers, putting some chopped cups in between each, and kept the buttercream as thin as possible since the cake had all the added sweetness of the candy. I gave it a semi-naked cake look because I love when you can see the multiple layers of cake. But I need more practice smoothing out the frosting without picking up cake crumbs.
Having been dazzled by the fancy look of sprinkles, I wanted to try another technique: applying sprinkles to the side of the cake. At first the entire process was horrifying. My desire for neatness was affronted by the scattering of jimmies EVERYWHERE.
I used the edge of my hand to try to funnel the sprinkles towards the side of the cake. Instead they just rolled along the turntable, onto my work surface, and from there onto the floor... with hardly any making it onto the cake. I even watched a YouTube video trying to figure out the trick to it. The YouTuber was doing the same thing I was, the only difference being that she was holding her hand at a steeper angle hoping the sprinkles would jump onto the cake, but the ratio of those that stuck to those that bounced around in abandon was still unsatisfyingly low.
In the end, I accepted that this technique was just going to be a mess, and lowered my stress levels. I approached it again, but ended up pouring sprinkles onto the flat of my hand and levering it sideways to slap the sprinkles into the side, trying not to touch the frosting itself. Then I used my angled knife to do the same with the sprinkles that landed on the turntable. I got a lot more on the cake more quickly and the knife used the fallen sprinkles to then fill in the gaps. I started to get too particular about the line of sprinkles being even all the way around the cake, but then I decided the unevenness was charming.
After cleaning up the space of runaway sprinkles so I could proceed with some semblance of order, I went about topping the rest of the cake. I used more buttercream in the middle to hold up the thin cups. In my mind I had imagined a fanning of the cups swirling around the top, but it would have taken a lot more cups to achieve such a pattern, so I left it at 5 and used more of the chopped cups to fill in the spaces in between. I liked the look of the cups chopped in half, with the peanut butter filling showing, so I tried to pile them in a way that had the cut sides out.
I had intended to do a chocolate ganache drip, but with all the candy and sprinkles thought it might be too much. I also meant to use Reese's Pieces, but the available space on top of the cake was slowly dwindling and I worried that the crunch of the pieces might detract from the enjoyment of the cake. I wanted it to be rich and satisfying and not just a novelty cake. So instead I went with the peanut butter and chocolate chips.
If I had thought about it, I probably would have stuck just miniature chips in the chocolate flavor only, to balance out the chocolate of the jimmies along the bottom of the cake. Miniature chips would have been a better contrast in size to the chopped cups. I also would have bought unwrapped cups. Unwrapping the individual minis from their foil wrappers and then from the paper cups was tedious. The chopped cups inside the layers could have been cut into smaller pieces too.
But the cake somewhat straight, didn't look like it was made by a 6-year-old, and despite being messy and hard to slice and serve because of the chopped candy inside was pretty delicious. I was happy that even though it was a very sweet cake, it wasn't sickeningly sweet or too much. And the frosting had enough peanut butter flavor to balance out the chocolate cake.
It turns out that Reese's aren't my brother's favorite candy, it's his wife's. He wasn't actually sure what his favorite candy is, which is surprising because he's mad for candy. My mom craved and ate it nonstop when she was pregnant with him and we have a joke that he could always find it if it were hidden anywhere in the house. But he was very touched and impressed with the effort, and everyone enjoyed the cake. So I still count it as a success. ;)
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