I was cooking this to take to some friends in Droitwich who were holding a New Year's Eve Party which is a good hr and a half away so I needed to make sure the cake was ready to go pretty much as soon as Tom came home from work that evening, so I had some quite specific time constraints.
I think I started baking around 11:30 on New Year's Eve and I think it was just about finished around 6ish (I had the Jessie J album on repeat and I think I listened to it about 4 or 5 times...), but I did have to do a lot of research on the internet and asking people at my local cook shop before attempting this, including what icing would be best to use for sticking the smarties on, how to frost a cake properly, and even how to work out mathematically how many boxes of smarties I'd need to complete the design (I didn't actually work it out for my design, but I did find a cool/geeky website where someone else had done it).
As I knew this one was going to take me a long time and that I'd need a fair bit of work surface, I decided to bring in our fold out metal table from the patio and one of the rather unstable chairs that go with it (this was before Tom got us our nice new dining table and chairs). Having researched the various different techniques required for the decorating part of the recipe I also had to go out and buy a palette knife and a cake scraper from the cook shop (again I can't believe how expensive this stuff can be). If you've not used/come across a cake scraper before, they look like this (featuring a reflection of my Pachira plant Roberto. And no, I don't think it's weird that I named my plant):
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| Why take a normal picture if you can take an arty-farty one? |
I also followed a video tutorial from the BBC Food website to help with the icing technique as this has always been my downfall in the past:
Icing a cake with buttercream (video)
Ingredients:
Chocolate sponge cake
250g butter, softened (plus extra for greasing)
400g golden caster sugar
3 tbsp sunflower oil
1 tbs vanilla extract
3 free-range eggs, beaten
400g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
pinch cinnamon
85g cocoa powder
220ml flat cola
150g strawberry jam (the stuff I used was more like a jelly, what you really need is something a bit runnier that will spread easily)
150ml double cream, whipped to stiff peaks
White Chocolate Buttercream
As I was only going to be decorating the one cake and not a whole wedding cake I adapted the ingredients for the buttercream to the following:
200g unsalted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
500g icing sugar
100g white chocolate, melted
Decoration
Lots and lots and lots of Smarties. What I really wanted was a couple of those giant tubes you used to see at Christmas but I couldn't find them anywhere! Instead I had to buy about 25 of the smaller hexagonal cardboard tubes from Sainbury's and the Co-Op which ended up costing me a ridiculous amount of money. Curses...
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 170C/325F/Gas 3.
2. Grease a 25cm/10in cake tin (I only had a 20cm tin and couldn't find any bigger ones in town. See problem no.1 below) with butter and line with greaseproof paper.
A neat trick for lining round cake tins with greaseproof paper can be found here:
3. For the chocolate cake, in a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until the mixture is pale and light.
4. In a separate bowl, stir the sunflower oil and vanilla extract into the beaten eggs.
5. Gradually beat the egg mixture into the butter and sugar mixture, adding just a little egg mixture at a time and making sure it is well incorporated before adding more, until all of the egg mixture has been incorporated and the mixture is well combined. If the mixture looks like it's starting to curdle with the addition of the egg mixture then you can add a bit of flour to prevent this.
6. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and cocoa powder until well combined. Mmmm, cocoa and cinnamon... :)
7. Gradually fold the flour mixture into to the cake batter mixture, a spoonful at a time, until all of the flour mixture has been incorporated into the cake batter. This might take a while as there are quite a lot of dry ingredients, but go slowly and your cake will be better for it!
8. Gradually add the flat cola to the cake batter and stir carefully until well combined. I definitely find it goes in better if you add it bit by bit, as with the egg mixture.
NB: If you only have fizzy coke, you can make it flat either by shaking it up inside the bottle and carefully opening the lid just a crack to let the gas escape (you might want to do this over a sink if you don't want coke all over yourself and the kitchen!). Or you can pour out the amount of coke you need into a measuring jug, add a small teaspoon of sugar, and stir. This will make the coke fizz up and release loads of the gas. Taste, and if it's flat enough then great, but if not, add a tiny bit more sugar and stir again to release the left over gas. This will make the coca cola (and therefore your cake mixture) a bit sweeter, but it's a lot less messy than shaking up the bottle!
9. Pour the cake batter into the greased, lined cake tin. Level the top of the cake out with a palette knife or spatula.
10. Transfer the cake to the oven and bake for 1hr 15 mins to 1hr 20 mins, checking regularly, or until the cake has risen and a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the centre of the cake. (If the top of the cake browns too quickly during cooking, cover it with a sheet of aluminium foil.). This is where we encountered
Problème numéro un....
Problem no.1
One of the first problems I encountered was, once again, down to incorrect equipment. The original recipe called for a 25cm cake tin, but the biggest I had and the biggest I could find in town was 20cm. This meant that it was quite difficult actually making sure the cake was cooked all the way through without drying out. Because the coca-cola makes the sponge so moist (and delicious), I think that really I needed a proper 25cm cake tin, or otherwise I should have used two smaller tins. What happened with my cake was that I kept checking it with skewers as the recipe recommended and they kept coming out gooey in the middle, so I had to keep putting it back in the oven to bake a little longer. The last thing I wanted to do was give people food poisoning!! Despite covering the top of the cake with tin foil as suggested to stop it overcooking, it still ended up being too dry on the top and outside of the cake. So I ended up having to cut off the dry bits of the cake, which unfortunately made it a bit untidy and crumbly when it came to decorating it later, and it also meant I ended up wasting food, which always annoys me.
Suggestion
Seems obvious, but next time I'll bake it in the correct-sized tin (25cm) or two separate tins (perhaps 18cm each) and make sure I swap over the shelves half way through. You'll need to cook them for less time since each tin will have less cake in it so having consulted my Mary Berry Desserts book (something I probably should have done in the first place - doh!), 25 to 30 minutes should probably do it, but obviously keep checking with skewers.
11. Carefully remove the cake from its tin and set aside on a wire rack to cool.When it's cooled down properly, cut the sponge in half horizontally to make two thinner cake halves.
12. While the cakes are cooling you can start to make your white chocolate buttercream icing. Bring a small pan of water to boil, and then reduce to a simmer. Melt the white chocolate in a heatproof bowl over the pan of simmering water (the bowl should not come into direct contact with the boiling water).
13. In a separate clean bowl, cream together the butter, vanilla, and icing sugar until light and fluffy. Stir in the melted chocolate. Set aside until ready to use.
14. Place one half of the cake in the middle of a cake board. You'll be decorating the cake on this board so it's easier to construct it directly on the board rather than trying to transfer it over later. If you've got a rotating cake stand even better!
15. Spread the jam to about an inch of the edge over one of the cakes halves, then spread the whipped cream on top of the jam layer. If you spread it all the way to the edge it just makes a mess when you put the two halves together. Place the second cake on top to create a sponge sandwich. Sounds easy, right? Well, this is me, and I can make anything easy into a disaster when I put my mind to it. This is where we encountered Problème numéro deux...
Problem no. 2
You know that part of the recipe that said, leave the cake to cool? Yeah, well I'm impatient, and I was worried about running out of time, so I might have been a bit hasty to get started with the filling. The cake halves were still a bit warm, so when it came to adding the jam and cream filling it all just melted and the top half of the sponge started sliding off the bottom, and it just made a big gooey, sloppy, nightmare-ish mess! So after a lot of cursing, I scraped the cream and jam filling into the bin (putting my newly acquired palette knife to good use), put both cake halves in the fridge to attempt to cool them down quicker, and got down to whipping more cream for the filling. Very lucky that the cake itself was smaller following problem no.1, or I wouldn't have had enough cream!
Suggestion
You don't save any time by being hasty. In fact you waste time and ingredients. Next time, let the damn cakes cool, until they are actually cool and not just lukewarm. Let this be a lesson to us all.
16. Once you've successfully constructed your cake, you can start icing it. But wait, what's this? I think I see what's coming...Problème numéro trois...
Problem no. 3
The once fluffy and light icing that had been patiently waiting on the side board had gone stiff again from the time wasted messing around with the filling, and attempting to ice with it was just pitiful. Imagine buying a stick of butter from the chilled section of the supermarket and attempting to butter bread right then and there. That's how unspreadable the icing was. Even attempting to soften it by beating it didn't seem to be having much of an effect.Suggestion
In the end I resorted to adding teeny tiny amounts of lukewarm water at a time to the icing and beating thoroughly again, and that seemed to loosen it up enough to make it spreadable. Phew!
17. Ok, now it's time to get icing. At this point I placed the cake board on top of a box of Celebrations to act as a cake stand, so I could rotate my cake while I was icing it. Following Dan Lepard's instruction video, I used the palette knife to generously add icing to the top of the cake. I didn't have a large ruler to scrape off the excess so I just used my cake scraper for that part.
18. Once the top bit is done, start coating the sides. Take a good dollop of buttercream and smooth it over the sides with the palette knife, carefully rotating the cake board/stand as you go. Once you've covered the sides all over with buttercream, hold the palette knife against the sides and rotate the cake so that you get a nice smooth even covering. Unfortunately my previous overcooking reared it's ugly head again.... Problème numéro quatre
This was a little bit tricky with my cake as it was still a little bit crumbly from when I'd had to cut off the dry bits from earlier on, and if you're not careful sometimes the icing can take off small chunks of the cake! Yikes!
Suggestion
If I'd have been less panicky and thought of this at the time, I would have taken a few moments to brush down the top and sides of the cake to remove any crumbly bits before starting to ice the cake.
19. Once you've managed to get the first layer on the sides you can straighten them out by tucking in the scraper to the sides (so the sharp edge lines up against the vertical edge of the cake), hold it still and slowly rotate the cake around. Apart from adding the Smarties pattern this was probably my favourite bit! Scrape the excess icing into the bowl and keep going until you're happy with the coating.
20. You're supposed to then chill the cake and give it a second coating of icing (the first one is called the crumb coat, as it holds in all the crumbs), but I didn't have time for that so I just had to get on with the Smarties part. Plus I figured that with the Smarties entirely covering the cake no one would see if the icing was perfect underneath or not. Cunning. If I did this again though, I probably would try and give it two coats, as I'm sure it would make it better.
21. Right then, Smarties. This is the really fun part. I first separated out my Smarties into the different colours.
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| Look at all the pretty colours.... |
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| Source: http://weheartit.com/entry/7825042 |
23. Once I'd finished the bottom row, I just started the second row and angled the first yellow Smartie above and slightly to the right of the one below and carried on the same colour pattern all the way around. I carried on working my way around and upwards, until I started getting near the tops of the sides and then I started angling them back to the left to create the wave shape. That's when I realised we might have yet another problem....
Problem no. 5
In the original image it looks like the colours on opposite sides of the cake match up so that you can join them in the wave across the middle of the cake. But the way I'd done it, they weren't going to match up. This is because, if you look at the cake from one side then the order of the colours is actually going to be reversed on the opposite side, if that makes sense. I was able to line up one colour across the middle, but I was going to have to create more of a fan pattern with the other colours. For example with the brown smarties I laid them out in a line from the edge of the cake to approximately the middle point, and then carried on that line with orange smarties so that it matched up with the orange rows going down the sides on the opposite side of the cake. Then I did the reverse on the other side of the yellow line down the middle, and then carried on with the other colours, working my way out from the middle to the outer edges of the cake.
Suggestion
What I did in the end didn't look half bad, and don't get me wrong, by the end of the day I was damn pleased with what I'd achieved, but the perfectionist in me always wants to improve things, so what I think might just work if I tried this another time is, instead of just repeating the order of colours one after another in that first row on the bottom edge of the cake is actually to start with the first colour set (yellow, brown, green, blue, purple, pink, red, orange) and then instead of starting at yellow again, you reverse the order so it now goes, red, pink, purple, blue, green, brown, then yellow, and keep going that way round. I'm not 100% sure it would work but it'd be worth a try at least. It all depends on the circumference and diametre of the cake really, and since my cake ended up being a bit smaller than 20cm diametre I have no idea how it would have ended up if I'd used the proper 25cm cake tin to start with.
When I eventually finished, this is what my cake looked like.
Ta Daaaa!!
I decided to use up the remaining Smarties by sticking them around the edge of the cake board with some left over icing, which looked pretty good, but made it a little difficult to carry form one place to another, so perhaps best to leave that unless you have a much bigger cake board than I did.
So there you have it, in one probably not very easy to follow recipe. If anyone does choose to take on this challenge let me know how it goes, or if you did / would do anything differently.
Bye for now!
xx
It was my son's 16th birthday this week so i made him his favourite fudgey chocolate cake but decorated it like yours but swapping smarties for his favourite - m&m's. he absolutely loved it so thank you for your fab idea!
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