How crazy and awesome is it that @matthew-williams 's birthday cake coincides with my 50th chapter of Claire's Crazy Bakes and Kitchen Hacks?! I am so excited!
This sugar-filled monstrosity took me three days to put together! I am absolutely sure that we'll be in a chocolate coma tomorrow as we celebrate Matthew's 12th birthday!
Our big oven is still on the blink, which means I could only bake one layer at a time. Oh my! But at least each layer only took 30 minutes.
For the filling, decided to use some delicious caramel treat. I thought about making two-tone icing again like I did for Meren's cake but then I thought how lovely it would be to have pure caramel in the centre!
How decadent does that look!
For the icing, I used traditional buttercream icing using:
500grams of butter
3 teaspoons of vanilla essence
3/4 cup of cocoa
2 cups of icing sugar
For the chocolate cake itself, I used my tried and tested unfloppable moist and perfectly delicious chocolate cake recipe and I basically just doubled it and split the batter into four layers:
Original Recipe:
Claire's Crazy Cakes, Bakes and Kitchen Hacks: Chapter 3 - Ultimate Chocolate Cake
Modified Recipe:
The Cake (S):
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius.
Tools:
You'll need a cake board or plate to put your cake onto (should be slightly bigger than your cake tin)
1 x 27cm non stick springform cake tins
Spray and Cook
Baking paper
A Cake Mixer (doesn't have to be fancy. Even a simple hand
held one is fine
Several wooden spoons (especially if you have children that
keep stealing them to lick).
A spatula for icing
3 large mixing bowls: two for the cake and another one for the icing
Cooling racks x 2
hints:
Prep your cake tin by generously spraying it with the spray and cook AND lining it with baking paper. Use scissors to cut the paper to line your tins accurately- place the baking paper shiny side of the baking paper facing inward: towards your cake
Use two separate bowls, one for dry and one for wet. This way you'll prevent yourself from forgetting to cream the butter, sugar and eggs before adding the dry stuff, which leads to this:
SAD CAKE!
Wet ingredients:
250g Soft Butter
1 Cup Castor Sugar
2/3 Cup Icing Sugar
4 Eggs, lightly beaten
3 Teaspoons Vanilla Essence
1/2 Cup Sunflower Oil
120 grams Jam (I like to use strawberry, but any jam is fine. For
American readers, this is preserve or jelly)
250ml milk
Dry Ingredients
2 and a 1/2 cup All purpose/ cake flour
1 cup of cocoa
2 Teaspoon Bicarbonate of soda
2 Teaspoon baking powder
Method:
Cream Butter and sugar until light and fluffy
Mix egg, oil, and vanilla and add in small amounts to the bowl
Add jam
In a separate bowl, sift together the dry ingredients
Mix wet and dry ingredients together now, and lastly add in milk.
Once evenly mixed (not lumpy but be careful not to overmix otherwise your cake won't rise) pour the mixture into your prepared cake tin and place as centered as possible in the oven. Bake for 35 minutes.
It is very important that you have small humans on hand to lick all the bows and spoons clean!!
@zakludick helped me get super creative with the toppings. Well, more like just ridiculous! We used flakes, astros and oreo cookies!!
