The pastry chef behind the PieCaken has made a new sweet creation just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Zac Young knows that Valentine’s Day often creeps up on people. This year, Young wanted to take a different approach to the PieCaken Bakeshop’s Valentine’s Day offerings to make it more fun for a couple to enjoy.
“Valentine’s Day is a tough category as many people associate sweets with the holiday. While I love a classic gift like a dozen red velvet cupcakes or roses, I wanted to step outside of the box,” said Young. “I wanted to make it more than just a gift, to make it an experience. Something interactive and coupley that produces these results that you see on Instagram or that you see others doing that you wouldn’t normally do at home.”
With that, the Spill Your Heart Out Cake was born.
The Spill Your Heart Out Cake is a six-inch cake made up of layers of devil’s food cake and chocolate mousse, creating a light yet delicious cake. The outside is covered with strawberry cheesecake frosting and topped with a rose champagne flavor glaze with sprinkles.
“When I think of Valentine’s Day, I think of chocolate, strawberries and champagne. The holy trifecta of Valentine’s Day flavors are going into this cake,” said Young. “I wanted it to be on the lighter side, so we did devil’s food which is very chocolatey while still light. And the strawberry cheesecake frosting is a nod to the PieCaken and gives the cake a nice, natural pale pink.”
The Spill Your Heart Out Cake is the beginning of Young’s latest endeavor, Sprinkletown. What sets the Spill Your Heart Out Cake apart from past offerings from the PieCaken Bake Shop is that it has a DIY element for those who buy one. The glaze and sprinkles come separately, allowing the customer to decorate their cake the way they’d like to on Valentine’s Day.
“I wanted this to be a couples’ thing. While it’s a bit of a DIY project, it’s not a meal kit or a cake kit — we do all the work, you get all the glory,” said Young. “One thing I love about these cakes is that each one is going to come out different, which I think is a great Valentine’s Day message.”
According to Young, the glaze was a tricky element to navigate in terms of making it user friendly. Early iterations of the recipe included having the customer add water to the mixture themselves, but the uncertainty of potential human error caused Young to scrap the recipe entirely in favor of one that allowed customers to make the glaze work without any additional prep work besides keeping it at room temperature.
“We’re letting you do the work, but we need to make sure you can replicate the results. It’s like when you publish a recipe, and in the comments section and some says it’s terrible, but you find out that they substituted asparagus in for the chocolate chips,” said Young. “We wanted to make this cake interactive, so we played around with recipes to make the glaze do the proper ooze and spill. The day we went into production I scrapped it and went with a new recipe. We had one shot here, we can’t take it back.”
Young hopes that the Spill Your Heart Out Cake can help bring some fun to the holiday, even for those who don’t plan Valentine’s Day weeks in advance.
“We find this every year. Unless you’re buying a diamond ring, people usually figure something out the week of,” said Young. “Unlike Thanksgiving or Christmas where you may be plotting out the meal at the start of the month, there’s a lot of last-minute stuff with Valentine’s Day. With this cake, we do all work for you and you get the glory of a spill out, oozing, sparkly love situation.”
The Spill Your Heart Out Cake is available for nationwide delivery on Goldbelly for $99. The cake serves 4 to 6 people and can be stored in the freezer for up to three months, while the glaze and sprinkles may be kept at room temperature. For more information, visit piecakenbakeshop.com.
