Happy birthday to me!
I celebrated my birthday this week, and was given a couple of 20cm round cake tins. I’d been planning on making a birthday cake to share with my colleagues on Monday anyway, but I knew I had no excuse with the tins!
I had a look in the Bake off book ‘Love to Bake’ and found the chocolate cake recipe inspired by the opening credits. It looked fairly simple, and didn’t require loads of ingredients. Since I started watching Bake Off, I’ve always wanted to have a go at making the cake, so I went for it!
The cake batter worked liked any other cake batter, apart from mixing the cocoa powder with boiled water and adding this in at the end of the process. A few hours later I realised I’d actually forgotten to add whole milk to the batter like the recipe asked for, but the cakes still looked okay when I took them out the oven.
I was pleased that the cakes had risen, as a few weeks ago I made a similar size cake which didn’t rise at all. I think I was just more careful throughout the process, and took my time.
The cake is sandwiched and covered by a chocolate ganache, but I’ve also added a layer of raspberry jam, to pair with the raspberries which will go on the top.
I’m really happy with the way the decoration turned out! I was a bit nervous about making the ganache the right consistency and ensuring it didn’t look a mess, but I’m pleased with my efforts. I don’t have a palette knife or cake lifter, so I had to ice straight onto the bottom of the tin I will use to carry the cake (hence the smears of ganache round the side). I could have used more fresh fruit to top, but as it isn’t in season it is quite expensive at the minute. I decided to add blackberries too, just for some variety.
Let’s see what my colleagues think about this tomorrow – they are chocoholics so hopefully they like it!
Bakes by Jo 