Easter Cake

As if I didn't already have enough chocolate to eat this Easter weekend, I decided to bake a chocolate fudge cake.

I used a recipe from my favourite baking book, The Baking Bible. I get all my recipes from there, it's just such a good book and has so many amazing recipes. This was the recipe for a chocolate fudge cake which is one of my new faves!

 The recipe is as follows...

Ingredients

Cake:

• 175g unsalted butter
• 175g golden caster sugar
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 3 tbsp golden syrup
• 40g ground almonds
• 175g self-raising flour
• Pinch of salt
• 40g cocoa powder

Icing:

• 225g plain chocolate
• 55g dark muscovado sugar
• 225g unsalted butter
• 5 tbsp evaporated milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and grease two 20cm/8 inch sandwich tins.
2. To make the icing, gently heat the chocolate, sugar, butter, evaporated milk and vanilla extract in a heavy-based saucepan. Stir it constantly until it has all melted. Put it in a bowl to cool down, then put in the fridge to chill until it is spreadable.
3. To make the cake, place the butter and sugar in a bowl and beat together until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs gradually. Stir in the syrup and ground almonds. Sift in the flour, salt and cocoa powder and fold into the mixture. Add a little water if necessary to make a dropping consistency.
4. Spoon the mixture into the tins and bake for 30-35 mins.
5. Leave the cakes to cool before icing and decorating.

I left the frosting in the fridge for waaay too long so had to re-melt the whole thing and wait all over again! But it turned out just fine and it tasted okay. But yea, I wouldn't advise leaving it in the fridge for more than an hour.

Next came the fun part- DECORATING!

The inspiration from Pinterest

I spend a lot of time procrastinating and scrolling through Pinterest and I found the cake above and was like whaaaaat!? It looked so pretty and I knew I had to make it. It had Kitkats round the outside but I'm not a massive fan of them so substituted them for Cadbury's white and milk chocolate fingers. But I didn't realise how big the cake was and I ran out of fingers!! So part of the cake didn't have anything round the edge. I decided to carry on the design on top and brought the little chocolate button flowers down the side. It actually worked quite well and it looked like I'd planned to do that all along!

I also made the chocolate eggs with Smarties in that you can see in this picture. They were such a fail. I made six but could only get three out the moulds and I think I burnt the chocolate a bit when I melted it so they tasted a bit off, but they look cool, right? Probably won't be making these again!

I had such a lovely weekend with my family, but I've eaten waaaaay too much. Hope you all had a wonderful Easter!

Love Becca xxx