Heart Shaped Birthday Cake

It's been a bit of a crazy time for us with John away in South Sudan since August. I was determined this year to not put huge pressure on myself to create the perfect birthday part and cake for Isabella. Memories of previous year's efforts and the dramas in creating them still inter for us all!

I'd used the idea of surrounding the cake with white chocolate covered biscuit fingers last
year and it worked really well...and meant the icing around the cake didn't have to be perfect. I also replicated the paper cut out number (for birthday years) with sprinkles around it...although this didn't stand out as well as last year.

I had found the instructions for making the heart on Pintrest. It just seemed too good to be true - simple and very effective - and it was. The key was finding a square and round tin that were the right size. To figure this out I held the round tin up to the edge of various square tins until I got the right fit.


Isabella asked for a chocolate cake. I used an easy recipe from Sophie Gray's 'Enjoy'. See below
I tried making the cakes the same height by putting the same level of mixture in them...this didn't work but it was easy enough to slice a layer off the higher one.

I made Butter Cream Icing - I like this because it is easy to use and can be whipped up in the food processor. See below

I used pink tubular wafers to put around the outside and added a ribbon to make sure they stayed put.
A good end result, minimal fuss and no stress!



DANA'S CHOCOLATE CAKE 
from Destitute Gourmet by Sophie Gray
Very moist cake, freezes well, either process in food processor or put all in
bowl and beat together.
1 & 2/3 c flour
1 & 1/2 t baking soda
1 & 1/2 c sugar
2/3 c cocoa powder
1 t salt
1 & 1/2 c milk
100g butter, melted
2 eggs
1 t vanilla essence
Oven at 180 C, grease a 20cm loose-bottom cake tin and line bottom - it is a very liquid mix and you don't want it to leak!! Put all ingredients into
processor and mix until smooth. Pour into tin, bake 50 min to 1 hour, check if done with skewer.

Butter Cream Icing
125 g softened butter
1 tbsp warm milk
flavouring of your choice
colouring of your choice
375 g icing sugar


Put the butter, milk and any flavour or colour in a mixing blow. Sift in the icing sugar a little at a time and beat well between each addition until it has all been incorporated and the mixture is light and creamy.

Rainbow Birthday Cake

Isabella chose a 'Rainbow' theme for her fifth birthday. After last year's Ginger Bread House fiasco where stress levels were high to say the least I was determined to make this year's cake a lot easier.
I found lots of examples of cakes with separate layers to form rainbows which all looked reasonably easy but my concern was the time involved in baking each layer. I found a couple of recipes for this cake and gave it a try several weeks in advance.
My trial cake seemed like it was going to be a bit of a disaster but turned out really well - a good sign for the 'real thing'.
The key to this cake it using a cake recipe and mixture that is pretty thick - I chose a Madeira cake for this reason and using A LOT of food colouring.

I wanted to keep the decorating quite simple to get the 'wow' factor when it was cut open. The white icing and white chocolate fingers were easy to put on.
I used a 'Butter Cream' icing (below) which was easy to work with and eventually set a bit hard.
The '5' was just cut out of paper, placed on top of the cake, then sprinkles added.
I did the top decoration before I did the white chocolate fingers so that I could keep the sides 'clean'.


Rainbow Cake
Make the cake mixture according to the recipe.  (I used about a 30cm tin and doubled the recipe. There was some mixture left over)
Take about 1/2 the mixture and use red colouring to colour. Create a red layer around the outside of the cake tin.
Next take smaller amount of mixture and colour orange and create the next layer.
Continue through the rainbow colours until you get tot he middle where you use a very small amount of purple coloured mixture.
If you have a lot of mixture left over you can colour it according to the colour you are short on and add mixture in. The cake is very forgiving!


Maderia Cake

250 g butter
250g sugar
4 large eggs
250g self raising flour
125g plain flour
4 teaspoons lemon juice

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Grease and line a 23 cm cake tin with baking paper.
Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
Add the eggs one at a time and beat after each addition.
Sift the flours together and fold into the creamed mixture.
Fold in the lemon juice
Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 40 minutes or until the skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.



Butter Cream Icing

125 g softened butter
1 tbsp warm milk
flavouring of your choice
colouring of your choice
375 g icing sugar


Put the butter, milk and any flavour or colour in a mixing blow. Sift in the icing sugar a little at a time and beat well between each addition until it has all been incorporated and the mixture is light and creamy.