As my summer break/vacation continues in visiting my family in Minnesota, my Dad celebrated his birthday. From my perspective, birthdays become less of a production as we age - or at least the desire to a make less and less of a production out of it grows stronger. For his birthday we had initially intended to make rhubarb ice cream... but couldn't find the ice cream maker (and we've now looked any place we could think of in and outside). The second request was for rhubarb pie, however most of the rhubarb was used for the ice cream mixture and there wasn't enough left over to make a pie.
So I put on my thinking cap and came up with another on the fly solution - something with fresh cherries since they are one of my Dad's favorite summer treats. And I love working with ganache, so the idea was born.
1 box vanilla cake mix
1 box instant vanilla pudding
2 cups milk
8-10 oz dark chocolate
1 1/2 c heavy cream
1 1/2 c pitted bing cherries
For the cake, mix up the pudding and milk as instructed. Stir dry cake mix into pudding mixture. Divide dough evenly between two 9 inch rounds. Bake at 350F for 30-35 minutes or until toothpick inserted into the center comes out cleans. Set cakes aside to cool before assembling.
Chop up chocolate and place in large glass bowl. Heat cream to near boiling (I used a microwave, be careful since fat in cream cases it to boil quickly). Pour hot cream over chocolate, allow to sit for a minute before stirring to combine cream and chocolate into liquid gold. ;) Let ganache cool.
*Normally with ganache I do an equal parts chocolate to cream mixture, but to whip the ganache later, it's better to have a higher cream content.
Once ganache has cooled but isn't solid, whip to be light and airy. (I had a bit of an interesting situation with mine... there was some kind of water separation and it wouldn't whip properly. I've made whipped ganache many a time before and this has never happened, my only variable I can think of is that I had to use milk chocolate, which I normally do not use.) Somehow I manager to strain the whipped from the liquid and layer that on the bottom layer. Arrange cherries on top of whipped ganache. Top with second layer.
I love creative layering - I might use this same cake base and whip up a peach shortcake. :)
