Another year, another birthday

In a couple of days it is time for another mid-life crisis as I turn 30. I have however already had some birthday celebrations as I spent Easter and last week back home in Sweden, so I took the opportunity to have an early birthday party for my friends back home (granted, before this I had already had two previous smaller birthday celebrations - one for friends who couldn't make it for this one to which I made the Cloud forest chocolate cake (no pictures) and one for family for which I made my old trusted favourite described in a previous post here).

Given that I had already done a fair amount of baking I wasn't really in the mood for anything overly complicated for this party. The photos below show the two cakes that I had. The one to the left is a traditional Swedish "gräddtårta" and consists of three layers of genoise with a mixture of mashed bananas and strawberrys between the layers, and coated with whipped cream. Very simple and very good. The decoration was made by my sister and is a portrait of me back in the days when I used to have a beard. :)
The other cake is a bittersweet chocolate charlotte. I've been looking at this recipe for a while, wanting to try it, so I figured this was a good occasion to give it a go. Once again, I received some help from my sister in stacking the ladyfingers in the bottom and around the sides of the pan. We didn't have enough ladyfingers to cover the top of the cake as well, so I just put some white chocolate shaving on it. I probably won't make this cake again. Everybody liked it and thought it was very good, but I was not thrilled. I didn't really like the texture of it, and given the amount of effort it after all required, I could probably do something better. The pictures also shows some cookies that my mother had made previously that I retrieved from the freezer.




Oh, I just remembered, that while not on the pictures, I also made a last minute batch of these chocolate and almond meringues from foodbeam that are very good.