Inspirational Birthday Cake

At my workplace, a cake is brought in for each person's birthday (unless we have multiple people with birthdays at the same time).  It's a bit amusing that, over time, the cakes have gotten taller and taller.  More often lately they've been chocolate, but otherwise, they're usually pretty plain.  Which isn't a bad thing, mind.

I've mentioned before, I think, that I enjoy making fancy cakes.  So whenever I see a cake with something interesting, I make a note of it and how to do it myself.

As I said, these cakes are generally plain.  Layered chocolate cake, not too sweet, smooth frosting, perhaps some writing that says 'Happy Birthday'.  This one had three layers of cake and two layers of non-sweetened chocolate ganache.  It also had, within the ganache, pockets of liquid salted caramel.

I've tried to make cakes with caramel filling, but either they don't taste right or the filling is too hard.  The best caramel, in my opinion, is between soft and liquid.  I'm not sure how this was done.  It looked a bit like the ganache was placed on the cake and then spots removed and replaced with the liquid salted caramel.  The caramel was soaking into the cake layers above and below each.

As a result of the soaking, this cake tasted even better the next day, and by the second day, what remained of the cake was even more soaked in the caramel.  Generally speaking, cakes dry up, and by the end of day two, if there's any cake that remains, we have to throw the rest away.  None of this cake was thrown away :).

It's been a while since I made a cake, but the next time I do one, I definitely want to try this sort of thing.