A couple of weeks ago my work colleagues and I decided that there just wasn’t enough cake in our lives, a problem I’m sure many people can relate to, so we decided to remedy this by having a cake day or as my husband called it A Celebration of Cake! Basically those of us not working were expected to bake a cake (bought cakes being against the rules) and those who were working were exempt from baking but not from tasting.
Now being the chocoholic that I am I was keen to make a classic chocolate cake but my husband wanted to make something epic. If you knew him, you would know that he loves cooking and is very good at it so he can be a bit of a cooking show off. So I knew right from the start that we would end up bringing two cakes to the gathering but the more cake the merrier right!
Being the converted English rose that I am, I wanted to use a British recipe and stumbled across a simple chocolate cake recipe from Nigella which you will find here. The only change I made was not separating the cake into two cake tins and simply using one tin as I did not have two identical size cake tins. This meant that the cake took about 45 minutes to cook. The other thing I did differently was that I decorated it with Maltesers instead of sugar flowers. I say I but this cake was a joint effort between my husband and I as was the second more ambitious cake.
We still hadn’t decided what cake to make for the second one until we were wandering through the local Co-Op and saw the berry stand and it hit us. We had seen Union Jack Jubilee cakes decorated with berries mid last year in a magazine and thought they looked great so we decided to give it a go. After all what’s more identifiably British than the Union Jack? Well maybe Winston Churchill but I don’t think his bulldog face would make a good cake decoration…….
Anyway we set to finding the recipe we had seen last year and whilst I am not certain we found the exact one, there was plenty to choose from. We settled on one from Baking Mad that looked easy and impressive. Again I made a slight change as we chose not to put raspberries in the cake mix as the recipe states and settled for just having the plain vanilla sponge. We were pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to make and decorate. Though we definitely over catered with the blueberries, strawberries and raspberries but that just gives us an excuseto make some berry deliciousness with the left overs!
I thought it would be interesting to bring some cake related trivia to our celebration of cake and found some interesting facts here and here.
The cake fest went well with some of my colleagues making some truly amazing cakes! The tea cup cup cake moulds were particularly cute and only £2 from the factory shop for a box of 6! I will definitely be picking some up for myself. Check out the photos.
In my search for various chocolate cake recipes I came across a number of yummy looking vegan cake recipe’s which in honour of my vegan twin sister I endeavour to give a go (even if she is over the other side of the world and can’t try them) so watch this space. What is your favourite cake to make?
Related articles
- Cake decorating fun! (lovingmaggie.wordpress.com)
- Guest post – Chocolate cake for lazy people (bonappetea.wordpress.com)
- Pink Lemonade Cake Pops (pixiedustkitchen.com)
- National Chocolate Cake Day – A Brief History of the World’s Most Beloved Dessert (berries.com)
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