A slice of cake is all you need.

Well, there goes another Valentine's Day! A bit of a rainy one this year in Vancouver.

To be honest, this year I spent considerably less effort than I did last year when I made the painstaking Hello Kitty truffles. But to keep up with my annual chocolate tradition, I did try a chocolate cake recipe from the Ladurée recipe book for sweets that I received for Christmas from a dear friend of mine. I had been deathly sick with a stomach flu from Christmas Eve all the way through until New Years, so when I received this in the mail (via another friend) on New Years Eve, I was ecstatic.

The book is beautiful! Velvet cover, gold edges, and pretty pictures inside. So far, I've only tried two recipes from the book. Two out of the few recipes that don't take 4 to 24 hours of preparation. I don't think either of my attempts quite turned out the way that they were supposed to; regardless, they tasted all right.

For this year's Valentine's Day, I decided to try the soft chocolate cake.

Basically, it was a lot of double boiling, pouring and repouring mixtures, and eggs. The cake wasn't as professional or successful as I would have hoped, so I decided to top each slice with a ganache I made afterwards. For the ganache, I included coffee and orange zest. It actually made a pretty suitable topping for the cake.

Happy Valentine's Day! Hope you had a day filled with chocolatey goodness. Oh, look at that. "Chocolatey" didn't result in a red squiggly line appearing under it. Excellent dictionary.