Durian Cake for Durian Lovers

When I asked Jerome what he wanted for his birthday cake, he said he wanted a durian cake. So that was my 4th challenge in cake making for a birthday :)

Durian Cake

I went to my collection of cook books at home & the net to search for suitable recipes. In the end, I decided to use the traditional sponge cake recipe that I've always been using. As I was baking a smaller cake (using the heart-shape cake tins I bought from Daiso), I used 3/5 of the original recipe. I cut up the flesh from a durian seed & mix it into the cake batter. In the end, I had extra batter for another smaller mould.

 

I had absolutely no idea how to decorate the durian cake. So I decided to sandwich some fresh cream & fresh durian flesh in between the 2 pieces of cakes. I covered the cake with fresh cream & wanted to coat a thin layer of cacao powder on top. And that's it...

When I was doing marketing later in the morning, I walked past a bakery & saw a durian cake & it inspired me to try decorating the cake to look like the real fruit...

After lunch, I quickly set about decorating the cake. I started by mixing my fresh cream to get a nice green for the thorns. I used a star nozzle to pipe the thorns. But halfway through, the freshcream started to melt... Maybe I didn't whip the cream well enough. So I tried another batch of fresh cream & it still melted while I was piping. So I decided to use butter cream instead. I put a little butter cream at a time into the piping bag so that my warm hands will not melt them. I placed the remaining cream in a bowl placed in a bigger bowl of ice water to keep cool. I will just keep refilling the piping bag with cool cream as I piped.

Real fresh durians on top of cake...

After piping the thorns, I piped the durian shell using butter cream. I tried placing real durians on top of the cake, but I can't keep it into the container. The cake was too high. So I pureed the durian flesh & mix the puree with some fresh cream, piping them on the cake to look like the durian seeds. I also had to use the spatula to smoothen the durian.

Durian cake, made to look like the real fruit...

Jerome was really surprised to see his birthday cake. He was actually quite impressed. I was just hoping that the taste will not disappoint as everything was really based on an experiment.

Jerome finished up the cake in record breaking time (even though we just had dinner) & said it's the best cake I've made so far. Then again, it's his birthday cake & he knew I made it especially for him. The cake has definitely more flavour & more durians than a store-bought cake.

It's a good thing I kept the cake in a Lock & Lock container, else the entire fridge will be smelling of durian...