Heart-Shaped Anniversary Cake

Here is a more comprehensive explanation of the sixtieth anniversary cake I featured yesterday. 

First of all I made one batch my signature marble cake recipe and baked it in my heart-shaped cake pan. The marble cake recipe I used is {Basic Marble Cake}. This marble cake doesn't look swirled on top, but becomes sort of layered inside as it bakes, which is because it is a thinner cake batter, leading to a moister cake. I also use a slightly different technique when marbelling my cakes. Instead of putting spoonfuls of alternating batters in, I pour in all the white batter, then pour the chocolate batter over top in streaks. This is similar in technique to making zebra cake (see {Zebra Cake}). If you do not own a heart-shaped cake pan, it isn't necessary, but one shape that can easily be made using standard cake pans. Just use an 8 or 9 inch round and square pan, place the square as a diamond, cut the round in half, and place the straight end of each half along adjacent sides of the diamond.

Once the cake was cooled, I placed it on a platter, placed strips of waxed paper around the edges of the cake to keep the platter clean, and covered the cake in ganache. It took exactly one recipe of {Cocoa Ganache Glaze} for the perfect thickness of ganache. I briefly refrigerated the cake to set the ganache, then carefully peeled away the waxed paper strips. The excess ganache that dripped onto the waxed paper can be easily scraped off with a butter knife and reused at another time reheated as ganache, or for another purpose (dipping, frosting, fondue, spread, truffles, etc.)

Once the ganache was set and my buttercream was made, I moved on to decorating. I first did the top border using a closed star tip, then the bottom border using an open star tip, the lettering using a plain small open round tip, the roses using a rose petal tip and a flower nail, and the leaves using a leaf tip. It took five decorating tips, but not a lot of time, and only one color of icing to complete this cake!