Friday 17 February 2012

Piece of cake.

I clearly remember when I was a child/teenager, birthday cake tasted significally better the day after the birthday party. My theory is that it's because there is less of it left. Here is my "after birthday" piece of cake.

And as the cake from Lucy's birthday party got so many compliments, I thought I would share the recipe for my friends who said it was very nice and all of the rest of my lovely blog readers. There won't be any photos of the cake making process, in fact, I am lucky I got a photos of this last piece!

I have doubled all the ingredients for both cake and the frosting. I'm sure nobody would have minded if I trippled them!
The cake itself :
Ingredients:
  • 140g butter , plus extra for the tin
  • 175g golden caster sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 225g self-raising wholemeal flour
  • 50g cocoa powder (I used Cadbury Bournville one)
  • ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 250g natural yogurt (I used Yeo Valley organic natural yogurt)
Method:
  1. Heat oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4. Butter and line the base of a 18 x 28cm cake tin or tray. Put the butter and sugar into a bowl; beat together with electric hand beaters until light and fluffy. add the eggs a little at a time, beating well between each addition. (Mine wasn't really becoming light and fluffy untill I started adding the eggs!)
  2. Sieve the flour, cocoa and bicarbonate of soda into the bowl, then tip in any bran left in the sieve. Pour in the natural yogurt. Stir everything to a smooth mixture and spoon into the prepared tin.
  3. Bake for 20-25 minutes until just firm and shrinking away from the sides of the tin. Cool in the tin for 5 mins, then turn onto a wire rack to cool completely
The recipe is taken from here. I especially liked all the healthy ingredients like wholemeal flour and natural yogurt and that there isn't that much sugar. But the cake it sweet and tasty.

And for filling and frosting I used Swiss Meringue Buttercream.
Here are the ingredients for it (again, I doubled the ingredients):

To frost:
5 egg whites
1 c (200 g) sugar
2 sticks (226 g) butter, room temp
I have decided on almond extract, so 1 tbsp for this proportion, or 2 for the doubled one.

And here is the detailed method, it's long, but it really was easy to make, just be prepared it takes a while. A LOT of mixing time for the electrical mixer. I came across this blog called Wisk Kid when I was looking for a rainbow cake, which I made last spring. In fact, I almost made it for this birthday party (was very tempting to see all the faces when the cake was cut!!!) but the chocolate cake looked a lot healthier. I'm a bit crazy about healthy eating especially for children so I felt bad about feeding them all that food colouring!
Anyways, the Wisk Kid blog even has tuturials for the cake assembly and on frosting a cake, which I have found very useful.

And to finish it off, I have decorated it with Milky Way "Magic Stars". Because it was the only thing Lucy liked out of the party bag she was given at one of the parties we went and gave me the rest of the chocolates. And because it seemed like an easy option. And the first thing the kids ate when given their piece of cake.











Please let me know if you tried to make this cake, I would love to hear how it turned out and also I would love if you share your cake ideas!

1 comments:

Helen said...

Looks so yummy Tamara. Well done.. Our little girls are getting do big!

 
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