Birthday Cake Hall of Fame No. 2

The Chocolate Edition! Whoop!


So, without further ado, bah ba da baaaah!


1. The Chocolate Guinness Cake


From Nigella Lawson's Feast - which, incidentally, has a whole chocolate cake Hall of Fame section! Hooray!

2. Chocolatey Squiggle Cake?


Chocolate sponge, chocolate butter icing, truffle and twiglet decoration and white chocolate squiggles on top?

3. Chocolate Raspberry Brownie Cake


My housemate made this one for me for my birthday and it was a chocolate fest in my mouth. Two layers of chocolate brownie sponge sandwiched with Nutella icing and raspberry jam, topped with raspberry pieces, marshmallow and moooore chocolate! MORE CHOCOLATE!

4. Big Shocker (Traditional Chocolate Cake)

Another from Nigella's Chocolate Hall of Fame. I added honey instead of golden syrup to the icing and it gave the whole thing an added dimension. (To the taste. Although now I think of it a 4D cake could be something to think about). Decorated with Malteasers...

When cakes go wrong...

Sometimes everything's just got to go a bit tits up.

It happens.

Rules for a Great (Cup)Cake

Cycling through the centre of London today, I was doing some sneaky scooting between the cars and the pavement to get up to some traffic lights, and I was halted in my tracks by a nice big horse poo. I wasn't best pleased, and definitely wasn't going to be ploughing Jan (my bike) through that, so pulled in front of the posh silver car beside me (he definitely wasn't going to be ploughing through that either). As I sat inhaling the bus fumes and nervously trying to keep as far away from the big shiny Bentley while also avoiding the mess on the road, I thought to myself - How come the police  don't have to clear up after themselves (and it was obviously the police because who else would willingly take their horse out of it's country paddock and ride it through the middle of the City of London on a Monday afternoon)?? I can't quite imagine them jumping down and packing it into an old Tesco bag, but still, don't they know there are rules?!


WELL. 


Admittedly, some rules are more fun to follow than others. And I'm going to put it out there: I'm pretty sure these rules for all-purpose/customizable cake mixture are more fun than clearing up after your pet. 


175g Softened Butter
175g Sugar
3 Eggs
175g Self-Raising Flour
Pinch of Salt
1 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract
1 Tablespoon Milk


Cream the butter and sugar together until it's lighter in colour, and then add the eggs one at a times (add a bit of the flour if it curdles) and then sift in the flour and add the salt and fold them in, making sure you don't beat the air out of the mixture. Then gently mix in the vanilla extract and the milk and then put the mixture in your tin of choice (can be split between two round cake tins or into cupcake moulds, or any other shape reeaally) and bake at 180 degrees for about 20mins - exact timing depends on your oven...


Options for customising this recipe aaaarrreee:


- Leave out the vanilla extract and add the juice and zest of 1 and 1/2 lemons 
- Exchange the vanilla extract for coconut flavouring, the milk for coconut milk and add a sprinkling of dessicated coconut 
- Exchange 40g of the flour for ground almonds, add a little extra baking powder and exchange the vanilla essence for almond essence
- Exchange the vanilla extract for rose or orange blossom extract
- Exchange 30g of the flour for cocoa powder, and add chocolate chips
-Anything that takes your fancy


Here are some variations I've made (and I remembered to take photos of):

Margarita Cupcakes (In honour of my housemate in Chile)
These ones use the lemon variation above for the sponge, and then the icing is just icing sugar mixed with tequila (and water depending on how potent you want them).
Decorate with a slice of lemon and a sprinkling of salt!

Rainbow Cupcakes
For these, I simply split the original recipe into 5 mugs, and added different food dyes to each one. In quite large quantities I might add to get a good colour when they're baked. 
Then just spoon a bit of each colour into the cake tin/cases and bake!

Oreo Cupcakes
Twist the tops off a pack of Oreos, and put the side with the cream on in the bottom of the cupcake cases and add the batter on top (the chocolate one with some Oreos crumbled in).
Decorate with cream cheese icing and the other side of the Oreo.  




And you know what, if this mixture had a horse, and for some reason was riding it through the City of London on a Monday afternoon, it would be down off it's horse and have that mess in an old Tesco bag faster than you can say poo-tastic.