Sweet! Or hot…?

I made a pretty sweet cake for my birthday yesterday. You could say I was on fire 😛 I got my inspiration for this cake from the Women’s Weekly Best Ever Kid’s Cake book and used their dark chocolate mud cake recipe in the same book. It turned out to be a super dense, rich and delicious cake, but maybe I’ll have some cream on hand next time! I actually made the cakes themselves a few days in advance and froze them, which didn’t seem to affect the texture or taste at all. I also used spelt flour instead of regular wheat flour so I could eat as much as I wanted! Which wasn’t too much it turned out.

I followed the recipe in the book (written here for your convenience) and poured the batter into 2 same sized round containers. The instructions were very vague on how to bake the cake, so I guess 180 degrees for about 20 mins. They turned out pretty good, but next time I might reduce the cooking time a bit to try and get an extra gooey (but still cooked) center. I also think that the cake may not need the extra cocoa as there are 2 blocks of chocolate in that cake! I’ll have to experiment. I cooled the cakes then popped them into a container in my freezer to keep.

I removed the cakes at the start of the day to give them plenty of time to defrost before the party. After going to work and while cooking all the other food for the party, I made the toffee (actually Mum made it and did a great job but don’t tell anyone). I followed the recipe in the Women’s Weekly Cooking Class Cookbook, but used apple cider vinegar instead of brown vinegar. This was definitely because I wanted to test it and not because I did not have the brown vinegar. Yup. It actually made toffee with a slight apple taste which was really nice! To get the colour of the flame we added 2 drops of yellow and 1 drop of red food colouring to the mix before it boiled. We needed the toffee to be the hard sort so it ended up boiling for about 20 mins. We spread it onto baking paper, allowed it to cool then broke it up to look a bit like flames.

Then came the icing and assembly. We made a basic buttercream and cocoa icing to go between the layers of cake and on top of the whole cake. I sifted some cocoa powder over the top of the cake to make it less shiny and look more like dirt (yum!). I used TV malt stick snacks to go around the outside (which made portioning the cake a dream!) and 1 milk and 1 dark flake to create the logs around the fire. Then shove the toffee pieces in artistically and some candles and voila! A yummy campfire cake 🙂 I used sparkler candles because… well… why not?

Bake on,

Beth