Wow, this whole birthday cake posting thing is taking FOREVER. I don't know how actual food bloggers manage to do what they do so well. This whole thing is starting to feel a little bit like a chore, but I'm trudging onwards. Besides, I'm fairly certain the subject matter of this post will re-awaken my lost enthusiasm.
Chocolate. Lots of it. Normally, Ganache calls for the use of only dark chocolate, and I toyed with the idea of following the recipe, but in the end my hatred of all things 70% cocoa won out, and I decided to go with a 2:1 milk to dark ratio.
So basically you break the chocolate up into pieces, and then lay it aside for the moment (take care to guard it against hungry family members, or be smart and buy an extra block.)
Then you start on the cream mixture that you'll be melting the chocolate in. So you get some thickened cream...
And some glucose syrup...
More again. And you mix it together with a tiny bit of caster sugar. You'll notice that the syrup doesn't mix in at all, it will just congeal around your spoon and refuse to dissolve, but don't worry, the next step should take care of that.
Heat the cream mixture over a really low heat, stirring until the syrup softens and mixes in. When there's no more stray strands of the syrup, turn the heat up a little, and let the whole thing come to the boil.
The you plop your chocolate into it , and stir it in 'til it's all melted...and gooey...
Ok yeah I think it's safe to say me previous apathy just disappeared. This stuff is like liquid gold, and I would probably sell my soul for it. Plus, because it's mainly milk chocolate, its not overpoweringly strong and bitter. 
When the cream and the chocolate are completely combined together, add a few chunks of really soft butter, and stir this in as well.
It will probably take a while for the butter melt, even though its so soft, so just keep on stirring. I think the butter is what gives it that really nice gloss, and it makes it taste smoother as well.
Now you just make sure you've scraped the chocolate off the sides of the pan, and you leave it alone to cool and set a little...
Well, after you play around with it for a few minutes, and amuse yourself by taking silly photos with one hand that result in your camera getting a tiny amount of chocolate on it.
When the chocolate has cooled, you pour it over your raspberry oreo from before...
and watch while it gets all yummy, and pools everywhere...
Oh my God, I'm so tempted to run to the store and buy stuff just to make this again, and maybe get some strawberries to dip into it.
Now, if you are like me, you will suddenly realise that you'd poured too much on, and now have to scrape the board clean, and waste all that good chocolate, which you otherwise could have eaten. I hate myself sometimes.
The scraping does not take so long, although the act of throwing that chocolate out almost certainly killed a large part of my soul, but my problems didn't end there..
Ah. Yeah. I think the chocolate found it hard to cling to the raspberry bits that were sticking out between the layers, and as a result, I had quite a few of these "bald patches" all over the cake, which came out as the chocolate started cooling. My initial reaction was to panic and throw my spatula on the floor in a tantrum, but then I realised that the cooled ganache is actually quite easy to manipulate.
So I left the top alone, and spread the ganache as evenly as I could along the sides. It wasn't quite the effect I wanted, but I figured I could cover up the lines the edges between the smooth poured chocolate and the not so smooth spread part with the butter cream piping, so I wasn't overly worried.
And Et Voila! That finishes the ganache part, there's going to be a tiny little post about the butter cream, but that'll be later in the week. Whew, no more giant posts about the same baking adventure, it gets old fairly quickly, I think I'll stick to one-post baking stories from now on.
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