We asked, you answered: Meet L.A.’s new favorite birthday cake

This is the story of a birthday cake, or rather, the pursuit of a birthday cake. The best birthday cake. One single favorite celebration cake to represent sprawling, diverse Los Angeles.

Let me backtrack.

Earlier this year the Los Angeles Times Food team began obsessing about birthday cake, what it meant to different people, and what might be the iconic birthday cake, if there were one.

Deputy Food editor Betty Hallock put the question out to the public with a survey. The survey asked readers of the Food section and followers on social media to name their favorite cake, filling and frosting for birthdays. The answers were as mixed as the city itself: Tres leches cake. Hazelnut dacquoise. Tropical fruit pavlova!

The overall favorite birthday cake was carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. (This one’s the ultimate carrot cake.)

But broken down into single components, the favorite cake layer was yellow, with chocolate at its heels. Best cake filling? More frosting (duh!), followed by fresh berries (so L.A.). Most popular frosting? Cream cheese, with whipped cream a close second.

We decided to build a crowd-sourced composite of those favorite components to create the ultimate birthday cake. And here you have it: a rich yellow cake with cream-cheese-and-whipped-cream frosting, filled with fresh berries and, yes, more frosting. It’s a cake that marries old-school birthday cake memories with modern emphasis on freshness and seasonality. It’s your birthday cake, L.A. Ta-da!

After all that, this reverse-engineered cake is strikingly similar to one of L.A.’s most beloved bakery cakes, the triple berry cake from Sweet Lady Jane, which is itself similar to the popular Chantilly berry cake from Whole Foods. And their precursor is the legendary berry cake from Phoenix Bakery in Chinatown.

But you wait and see: Ours is better than both.

The Whole Foods Chantilly berry cake is defined by almond extract in both the cake layers and the frosting. The almond flavor is not subtle. So if you don’t like almond flavor (I don’t), you’re not going to like that cake. (But I ate the entire square I bought anyway. Research.)

The cake layers of the SLJ cake are similar to ours — they’re buttery, light and rich with egg yolks — though ours is more buttery, just as light and more flavorful. The frosting for the triple berry cake is straight-up whipped cream (snore), where ours marries the distinct flavor of cream cheese frosting with the airy, refreshing qualities of whipped cream plus rich, triple-cream mascarpone and tangy crème fraîche. This frosting has character. Plus our cake has a thin jam layer for added richness and depth of flavor. The SLJ cake is like eating berries and cream (if you tried hard enough, you might even convince yourself it was healthy). Ours is more like a special occasion (e.g. birthday!) cake.

Pastry chef and food stylist Rose Wilde puts the cream cheese and whipped cream frosting on the L.A. Times’ ultimate birthday cake.

I did not grow up in a yellow-cake home, or a homemade-birthday-cake home for that matter. When my mom made cake, it was carrot cake — because of the vegetables involved, she felt good about letting me eat it. For birthdays, she ordered sheet cakes from the local bakery. Those were indeed yellow, with a thick layer of jam and white frosting and topped with a scene that my mom custom ordered depending on my obsession at the time: a soccer field, a ski slope scene, a tennis court, a band with the trumpet front and center.

So when I set out to make this cake, I didn’t have any history with it. I was a yellow cake blank slate. (Did you know that egg yolks are what make yellow cake yellow?) To be honest, I never thought there was a reason to make yellow cake, when you could make a flavor bomb like carrot cake or chocolate cake instead. Yellow cake seemed kinda boring, but I was eager to be proven wrong.

The final layer is placed gently on top of the cake, and the cream cheese and whipped cream frosting is dolloped on top.

The first steps on a long journey seem epic and brave, when you look back on them. My first step on this journey, many many cakes ago, was the yellow cake from Claire Saffitz’s book, “Dessert Person.” My friend Jen, an obsessive cake baker and my sounding board on this project, loves Saffitz. The cake, made with a combination of butter (for flavor) and oil (for texture) was everything I already thought about yellow cake: It was fine.

I moved on to one that my friends Nate and Sarah, both food professionals in my coffee klatch, said was rave-worthy, from Stella Parks’ book, “BraveTart.” What was remarkable about that cake is that it called for a whopping ½ cup (which equals eight to nine) egg yolks — and zero whites. It was delicious in a pound cake sort of way, but not the classic yellow cake I was looking for.

I made at least half a dozen more cakes and enlisted Jen to make half a dozen more still. I ate a lot of cake. She ate a lot of cake. Her partner ate a lot of cake. My mom and her caregivers ate a lot of cake. And we (regrettably) threw away some yellow cake.

Finally I came up with a yellow cake that doesn’t make me say, “Why wouldn’t you just make chocolate cake instead?” This is that cake: a light, buttery, vanilla-forward cake with what I think is the perfect ratio of egg yolks, egg whites (whipped to soft peaks and folded into the batter, to lighten the cake), butter and vanilla.

A mix of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries are carefully added to the top of the cake, along with fresh flowers.

I opted for an all-butter cake. Because it’s a simple cake, butter is a crucial flavor component and I didn’t want to take any of it away (many yellow cakes are made with a combination of oil and butter).

I was willing to allow a slightly more solid cake experience for the inimitable flavor of all butter.

The frosting — and let me tell you, I made many, including a buttercream that starts with cooking egg yolks and cream into a custard — combines cream cheese for flavor and whipped cream for volume.

Mascarpone, an Italian triple-cream cheese similar to clotted cream, gives it the structure it misses from not having butter. Butter was too heavy to go with berries.

And crème fraîche (or sour cream) folded in at the end gives it a bright tangy note that is delicious with the berries — and yellow cake.

Whether this cake is for you remains to be seen. What I love about it is that it’s a democratic cake that brought us back to where we might have started, only much better, proving that the voting process indeed works. Even when it comes to cake.

Have a slice of the ultimate birthday cake.