Baby Brothers Birthday Cake

It seems now my passion for baking has returned that I am now forever doomed to be the family Birthday Cake maker, as not two weeks after making a cake for my nan, it was my brothers birthday, and I was asked once again to bake for the occasion. I did ask my brother what kind of cake he wanted hoping he would come up with an idea for a design but his answer was simply, chocolate cake. Believe it or not when I was a kid I wasn't a big fan of cake, unless it was a fruit cake (weird I know), and even to this day, whilst I have grown to love cake I am not a big fan of chocolate cake! So feeling rather uninspired I googled chocolate cake and found this recipe from Good Housekeeping which I thought looked nice, and then I just had to tackle some form of decoration. So I decided to trawl Pinterest, and after typing in Chocolate Cake I found my inspiration cake!

Courtesy of bakingmad.com

The thing I loved most about this cake was that the decoration looked so simple yet really attractive, so I decided to base the design on this, but as my brother requested a chocolate cake, I decided to cover it in several different kinds of chocolate, instead of sweets.

The recipe for this cake required the following ingredients:

For the Cake:

225g Unsalted Butter
225g Plain Chocolate
450g Caster Sugar
175ml Milk
4 Medium Eggs
150ml Sour Cream
250g Plain Flour
1 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
40g Cocoa Powder

For the Icing:

200g Plain Chocolate
50ml Double Cream
40g Golden Syrup
200g Unsalted Butter
250g Icing Sugar

For the Decoration:

2 boxes of milk chocolate fingers
2 boxes of white chocolate fingers
5 'share bags' of your favourite treats (I used, Malteasers, Milky Bar Buttons, Magic Stars, Revels, and Mars Mix)

I started by making the cake mix, which first involved melting the butter, sugar, chocolate and milk in a pan until smooth. Once this was done I left this to cool completely before moving to the next step. Once the chocolate mixture was cool I mixed in the eggs and sour cream using a stand mixer, until combined. Finally adding the flour, cocoa powder and baking powder and giving it a final mix. This then went into my prepared tin and then sat in the oven for 1 hour and 45 minutes, which felt like forever...

Once the cake was out of the oven and cooling I moved on to the icing. This involved melting togther more chocolate, cream and golden syrup until smooth, again leaving this to cool. Then I moved onto making a buttercream by whisking together softened butter and caster sugar. Once this was done I combine the chocolate and buttercream mixtures, and then set this aside to set until the cake was completely cool. Once the cake was cool I carefully levelled the top, and then cut the cake in half horizontally to give two layers. These were sandwiched together by some of the icing, which I then used to cover the rest of the cake. Before the icing had a chance to set I lined the outer edge with the chocolate fingers alternating between milk and white chocolate. The final step was to place the different kinds of chocolate on top of the cake, which I had far too much fun doing... I actually think more chocolate went into my mouth, than on the cake, but that's one of the perks of baking!

Here is the finished result, which I think looks great. I cannot stress enough how easy this cake was to make and decorate, so if you see this and would like to have a go, please don't be put off! This would be the perfect cake to impress friends and family with because who (other than me) doesn't like chocolate cake?

Have you baked anything this week, leave a link in the comments so I can have a nosey!