This was the finished cake -
I started with a basic chocolate mud sponge recipe. I like this one, with some tweaking -
http://www.nigella.com/recipes/view/white-chocolate-mud-cake-3436
I cut the caster sugar down so it equals the total flour, and add a teaspoon of baking powder.
I use the cakeometer app to scale my recipes to the pan size I'm using. It's not a free app, but it's worth paying for if you bake regularly and use different sizes of pans. I use everything from 6" to 12".
So once I'd scaled the recipe, for this cake I had to halve it, as I only want one layer of each type of chocolate. Then I bake 3 cakes, one with dark (semi sweet) chocolate, one with milk chocolate, and one with white chocolate.
The white chocolate layer always looks so awesome when it comes out the oven!
Once the three layers are cooled, I sandwiched them together with chocolate buttercream.
350g butter
700g icing sugar
100g dark chocolate
100g milk chocolate
1 tsp vanilla extract
Put the chocolate in a glass bowl on top of a pan of water to melt, ensuring the water does not touch the bottom of the bowl. Meanwhile, cream together the butter, icing sugar and vanilla extract.
Once the chocolate has melted, mix it in with the butter and sugar. If needed, you can add milk 1tbsp at a time to get the consistency you need.
When I'm using a different frosting for the outside, I try to leave a centimetre around the outside of the sandwiched frosting so that it doesn't get picked up when you frost the sides of the cake.
Next, I made a salted caramel buttercream.
250g butter
250g trex/crisco
500g icing sugar
6-8 tbsp canned caramel
1 tsp salt
Cream the butter and trex, then add the sugar, salt and caramel gradually until fully mixed. Taste, and add more caramel if needed. If needed, add milk to achieve a piping consistency.
Once the frosting is ready, I crumb-coated the cake, by applying a thin smooth layer of frosting to the top and sides of the cake with a palette knife. This is going to have further decoration so it doesn't need to be immaculate.
Then, I filled my piping bag with the caramel frosting and a large open star nozzle. I had decided to try a new method of frosting on the top, which seems to have quite a few names! I'm not sure which is most appropriate but the most common seems to be 'petal' frosting.
To frost like this, you pipe a small amount at your starting point on the outside of the cake. Then using your palette knife you press down and pull to drag the icing into a petal shape. Then you repeat. It's time consuming, mostly because you're constantly changing between piping bag and palette knife, but the effect is striking. I chose to use the open star nozzle but you can use a large round nozzle also.
As you start to build up the outside circle, you can then start on the next circle, and once that's established, move inwards again, as the picture above shows.
The tricky part is the last petal in each circle, there will be a difference here on every circle. You can see below in the top left corner where my circles finished.
When I first planned this cake I was intending to make a chocolate cage at this point, but by now it was 7.30pm and I was hungry and tired! Time for a change of plan. So I piped a ring around the base, to both cover the join line to the base and catch the drizzle.
Mmm the drizzle.
I've used this drizzle effect on cakes before, it's a quick and simple way to decorate the sides and add a colour contrast. I used a bottle of Hershey's Chocolate Syrup, and poured a little at each point where the petals join, so that it drips down the side of the cake.
To finish it off, I popped the fondant Lego pieces on the top to create the '40', and gave it a blast with silver shimmer spray.
Cake finished, and kitchen handed over to my lovely boyfriend to clean up!
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