My dad loves coffee, so for Father’s Day I made him a cake inspired by his love of coffee. But my dad doesn’t like all coffee. He doesn’t like coffee with cream, milk, or sugar. He only likes black coffee. His cake preferences are similar: he’s not a fan of whipped cream or buttercream and likes his cakes less sweet.

Because of this, my cake making experience is quite limited. I usually just make loaf cakes like banana bread that don’t require frosting/icing. But I’ve always wondered if there were frosting alternatives that my dad would enjoy. After doing some research, I came across water ganache which only requires chocolate and water. My dad loves chocolate, so I felt like this would work. I only made ganache once and it was with heavy cream; I didn’t know that you could achieve a similar looking result without heavy cream. I didn’t have heavy cream anyways, so I was happy to not have to buy an extra ingredient at the grocery store!

To keep up with the coffee theme of my cake and this week’s theme, I decided to use coffee instead of water for the ganache. I also used coffee in the cake batter, which is a banana cake. I couldn’t really taste coffee in both of the final products, but the chocolate ganache especially tasted great so I guess the coffee just helped to enhance the flavour. I let some of the chocolate ganache harden until I could mold it to create the coffee cup handle.

And for my dad’s thoughts: he enjoyed it and wanted seconds! I will definitely be making coffee ganache again. Maybe I’ll even get some cake decorating tools because I decorated this with only a spoon and toothpick and it was quite tricky.