It’s my
partner’s birthday tomorrow so I made cake for him and, apparently, his
workmates. It’s very cute so I thought I’d
share it.
The power of
this is in the decoration. I made
chocolate beetroot cake, one of my favourite chocolate cakes. You could make anything you like. Any chocolate or vanilla or lemon cake, even
fruit cake if you’re into landfill, would work.
The construction is the impressive part.
I based the
bits beyond the actual cake on the one on this site: fine craft guild with personal adaptations.
I’ll give
you my Beetroot Chocolate Cake recipe to use if you want to. Because of the beetroot, this is a moist cake
which gets better with (a little bit of) age.
Line one
large or two medium sized cake tins with cooking paper and oil spray. This is a big cake, so you can make two if
you want to. If you do that, for this
particular decoration you can stack them one on top of the other, filled with
ganache or something else. I made one
cake.
Pre-heat the
oven to 180°C.
Take a huge
bowl and sift into it:
2 ½ c plain
flour
2 t baking
soda
½ c cocoa
(use the good stuff)
1 t salt
Drain an
850g can of beetroot. Set aside.
In a food
processor, mix together:
4 eggs
2 c sugar
1 ½ c
cooking oil (I use canola)
2 t vanilla
essence
Mix that
into the flour. In the meantime, and don’t
mess abut as you don’t want the soda to get too excited before the whole thing
goes in the oven, blend the beetroot to a fine slush in the food processor (don’t
bother to clean the bowl of the food processor).
Mix that into the flour and sugar mixture and
pour into the tin(s). Cook for 45-50
minutes for 2 tins, longer for one large one.
It’s cooked when a skewer comes out clean when poked all the way
through. Cool completely before
decorating. I cut the very top off the
cake to make it a bit flatter before decorating.
So for the
fun, impressive decorating bit.
Pour 1 ½ cups
of cream into a clean saucepan. When it’s
hot but not boiling, take it off the heat and stir 200g of dark chocolate into
it until it’s all melted together. This
is called ganache. Set aside until it
cools.
To make the
pigs I used white pre-made fondant mixed with a tiny amount of pink food
colouring. The fondant needs playing
with to make it pliable and mouldable. Mould
into pig shapes – anything you like. I used
these shapes:
Make sure
that they’re cool and hard before you place them on the cake.
Once the ganache
is set and spreadable, which may take a while (I chilled it in the fridge for a
bit) and when the cake is cool. Spread
some ganache around the edge of the cake and and stick chocolate fingers around
it to resemble a fence. Other recipes
use Kitkats. I wonder if twix would work? Tie a ribbon around the ‘fence’ to keep it
all there. Clearly a pink one is the
best idea.
Pour/spread
the rest of the ganache on the top of the cake.
The ganache needs to be quite thick at this point to ensure that it doesn’t
slip through the fence. Gently park the
pigs in the most elegant poses possible and chill for an hour before
serving.
Please send
me photos of yours. I like the idea of
it with frogs instead of pigs. Are you
game?
