If you know me at all you will know I love baking. I love cakes. I love bread. Anything baking related.
I really LOVE The Great British Bake Off. I’ve watched it since the first series and become just a little more hooked each year.
The very lovely Helen from The Crazy Kitchen and Jenny from Mummy Mishaps have set up a new weekly linky called The Great Bloggers Bake Off and I am thrilled to be joining in. I may not join in every week depending on how my bump is behaving but I’m aiming to.
This week I decided to make a Chocolate show stopper cake after some serious inspiration from Tuesdays show.. Typically it ended up being less show stopping than I intended when my toddler took a BIG tumble and bashed her mouth but I was still happy with the end result. More than happy, in fact I will go as far as to say its the tastiest cake I’ve ever made.
I based the sponge recipe on my Ultimate Chocolate Cake and simply added 1/2 tsp of Peppermint extract and 1tsp of dried ground chocolate mint (you could use normal garden mint but I had an abundance of choc mint in my herb garden). For the mint buttercream filling I made a standard buttercream with 100g of icing sugar, 1 tsp of mint extract, 50g of butter and 1tbsp of choc mint infused warm milk – I also added a dot of green colouring from Hobbycraft to make it look minty! The cake was covered in milk chocolate icing which is an old favourite recipe from my trusty Bero book and is just 60g of melted butter blended with 1tbsp of cocoa powder and mixed with 250g of icing sugar and 3 tbsp of milk ( I used the mint infused milk for a subtle choc mint flavour ). The decorations were made by coating fresh Chocolate Mint leaves in white and dark choc and chilling in the fridge until set. Et voila.
The sponge is a really easy all in one method:
Making decorations:
Mint leaves:
My emergency cake stand:
There isn’t a lot left:
I highly recommend making this cake – it’s fairly straightforward and with a teeny bit of extra effort would make a spectacular occasion cake.
