Celebration Cake – Chocolate Cake with Fancy Butter Cream Icing in Yellow and Maroon Rosettes

 

This cake received lots of appreciative “ooos and ahhs” from the people I gave it to (plus everyone who has seen it).  The cake itself is a basic and quick to make recipe out of a book I was given by my Grandmother, when I was a child. Although the recipe is standard, and you can swap it out with many more decadent recipes, it means a lot to me because of the association with my grandmother, which is why I used it here, (although, being me, I tweaked the original recipe a bit).

 

Cook’s notes:

• For this recipe I used a round 7” cake tin.
• To make the rosette decoration, use a Wilton 1M piping tip.
• The food colourings used for the decorative icing rosettes are: PME brand paste colours in “Sunny Yellow”, and “Maroon Red”. pmecake.co.uk

 

 

RECIPE: CHOCOLATE CAKE

 

150g (6 oz) butter

150g (6 oz) caster sugar

3 eggs

150g (6 oz) self-raising flour (or 150g plain flour and add 1 rounded teaspoon of baking powder)

1 tablespoon of cocoa dissolved in

1 tablespoonful of hot water

 

1. Beat the butter, either by hand or in a mixer, then gradually add the sugar. Beat until mixture is a pale yellow colour.

 

2. Break the eggs into a separate bowl and whisk together. Gradually add the beaten egg to the creamed mixture, in small amounts, beating well after each addition. Adding the eggs in gradually avoids the mixture curdling. It the mixture does curdle, add in a tablespoon of flour.

 

3. Add in the cocoa (combined with the hot water), and mix until combined.

 

4. Add in the flour and fold the mixture together, by hand.

 

5. Grease the tin and line with greaseproof paper.

 

6. Pour mixture into the tin and bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 25-30 minutes.

 

7. Allow the cooked cake to cool on a wire rack.

 

 

 

BUTTER CREAM ICING:

 

250g icing sugar

125g butter

1 dessertspoon boiling water

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

 

Mix all ingredients together to form a smooth icing.

 

To combine the icing colours:

 

1. Divide out a small portion of icing and put aside (this is for the maroon colour).
2. To the larger amount of icing, add the yellow food colouring and mix well. To the smaller amount of icing, add the maroon food colouring and mix well.
3. Into the icing bag, add the maroon coloured icing so that it sits in about 5 stripes inside the bag, going from the top of the bag down to the tip. Then carefully add in the main colour, (the yellow icing), so that it doesn’t disrupt the maroon stripes.
4. Push a bit of icing out of the bag until you get the blended effect, and then ice the cake.