Saturday 4 February 2012

Valentines Raspberry and White Chocolate Cake.


Roses are red
Violets are blue
I'm easily distracted
Oooh, look, Cake!





Ok, this is a quick post for now for various reasons, I'll upgrade it when BT give me my own broadband back :) *It's back now, this is the upgraded/old post mash up :) *

I finished this cake about an hour ago and to be honest I was bloody glad it was all over lol
The last thing the cake did to try and thwart my attempts to finish it was throwing my pack of lovehearts out of my trolley in Tesco without me noticing, or remembering until I'd got outside. Re-joining the uber-queues for 1 packet was not an option. All praise be then to my lovely local shop that had some!

So finally done, this is a 2 sponge cake with a hint of raspberry in the sponge, a layer of white chocolate buttercream and Raspberry jam in the centre and covered with white chocolate buttercream. I then added home made dark chocolate hearts, 'Red' (I tried lol) buttercream blobs, big and small, white regalice hearts, the stand-up silver lustre'd chocolate hearts, the Lovehearts atop the blobs (They don't half have some weird things written on them nowadays!)
What the...?
 and finally wavy maltesers!!! Whooop!

I made this cake not only to eat, although it looks like the snow is might put pay to getting it to where it was going to be eaten tonight :( , but also to see what I could come up with knowledge i've picked up over the last few months (If any! haha), and also to enter in some Valentines Bloggy Bake comps! Yay!

This is entered in the wonderful @cakeboule's Valentines Craft and bake Competition (Do have a browse of her awesome creations while you're there, after putting a drool-capture device on your keyboard!)

I'm also entering it in @EnglishMum's 'Baked with love' Bake-off!




Ingredients:
  • 225g Self raising flour
  • 25g Cornflour
  • 250g Caster sugar
  • 250g Soft Butter
  • 4 Medium eggs
  • 2 tbsp Raspberry puree 
  • 2 tbsp Milk
  • 2 tsp Baking powder
  • 1 tsp Vanilla Extract.

For the filling and icing:
  • 500g icing sugar
  • 200g Soft Unsalted butter
  • 2 tbsp Milk
  • 200g White Chocolate, melted then cooled a bit.
  • 200g Seedless raspberry jam.


Preparation:

  1. Preheat the oven to 180c. 
  2. Prep the tins - Grease and line 2 x 23cm/9" cake tins. (Or in my case spray cake release around 2 non-stick 23cm/9" springforms.) This recipe amount makes fairly shallow sponges but quite a nice depth cake once the icing and filling is added. If you want a deeper cake use 20cm/8" tins. 
  3. Mix the caster sugar and butter together in a bowl.
  4. Sift the flour, cornflour and baking powder into a seperate bowl.
  5. Add 1 egg at a time and some of the flour whilst mixing, until all the eggs and flour mix are added.
  6. Add the raspberry puree, milk and vanilla extract whilst mixing. 
  7. Split the batter between the two tins.
  8. Bake for about 30 mins or until a cocktail stick comes out of the middles clean.
  9. Eat. Oh, wait, not yet haha.
  10. Allow to cool in the tins for 10 mins, then tip out onto cooling racks to cool completely.
  11. Put the white chocolate in a bowl and melt over simmering water or in a microwave, heating for 30 secs at a time.
  12. Meanwhile mix the soft butter in a bowl slowly adding the sifted icing sugar and a splash of milk at a time.
  13. Keep mixing and add the melted chocolate.
  14. Apply about a quarter to a third of the icing to one of the sponges.
  15. Put the jam in a small bowl and mix a bit with a fork just to loosen it up a bit.
  16. Spread the jam over the iced sponge and sit the other sponge on top.
  17. Using a palette knife apply the rest of the icing to the cake.
  18. If the icing cools too much it can become a bit of a sod to spread out, prefering to stick to the knife, even a heated one, rather than the cake. If you leave the icing to set a short while then it dries a bit and doesn't stick so much but you can still smooth it. I quite liked the fluffy look but I wanted the top smooth for the decorations. I was planning to stick icing hearts on the side but after fighting the choc icing decided to leave it fluffy :)
  19. Eat, or decorate, then eat.
The heart chocolates were made by just melting dark chocolate and using silicon moulds, saving some to cool slightly and be piped into heart shapes on some baking paper. Something that I managed properly on the 3rd attempt after the choc cooled too much in the piping bag lol
White hearts were rolled out Regalice and cut out with heart cutters.
'Red' blobs were buttercream with red food colouring (And then you added too much black food colouring didn't you? - ed.) Yes.




















A second version of the cake.








Mega cake! = Mega Tune Selection


Fell in love with a girl, fell in love once and almost completely.... White Stripes - Fell in Love With A Girl.




Love this bit of Love! Courtney Love - Mono.


The best remix of this! Flip and Fill ft Kelly Llorenna  - True Love Never Dies (Kenny Hayes Remix)


and Awwhhhhh, to get you all in a Valentines frame of mind, a snippet of The Wedding Singer :)



Big stringed classic love bought to you courtesy of Holly and co. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - The Power of Love.


Talking of classic love songs.... G n R - Used to love her




Oh Wendy! *Drools* :) Transvision Vamp - I Want Your Love





Eh oop! Another Classic! A couple of versions of this one, First off Candi Staton and The Source - You got the Love.



And then Florence gets her lungs pumping for this, really quite good, cover. Florence and the Machine - You Got the Love 






Can you feel my Love Buzz? No? Ok, I'll turn it up a bit... Nirvana - Love Buzz (I really am sounding like a crap cheesy DJ now lol)




Couple more.... Killing Joke - Love Like Blood! Soooooo good!



I do love a big dose of Freemasons! - ft Amanda Wilson - Love On My Mind




Um, a couple more :D

Huge! Huge! Classic Neil Young cover from St Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart




Taken from one of their best albums, Disintegration, The Cure - Love Song




and finally.... aaaarrrghh, too many to choose from..... 

Daniel? Daniel who? Hehe. Natasha Bedingfield - Soulmate





...and the final finally Madness - It Must Be Love







Love to you all.


P.S.  :)



17 comments:

  1. Wow, that is a beautiful cake. Love those malteser fascinators ;)

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    Replies
    1. Thank you Janice :) Nice to have something to play with whilst eating the rest of the cake :)

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  2. One word - stunning! OK not for my signature essay :) I adore this - even my hubby stopped plahing with his phone to look and go wow! I can envisage a fun game where you have to try and eat the malteasers off the wires! Thank you for entering the competition - good luck!

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  3. it was supposed to say now for my signature essay (not) not - confused yet! Oh well that's me...

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    1. Thank you :)It must be special to stop a man playing with his phone! lol

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  4. Wow! So much beautiful detail! Hope the snow doesn't keep it from its destination xx

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    Replies
    1. Thank you :) Sadly the snow won, but the charity quiz night's loss was my work colleagues' gain.

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  5. Amazing cake decoration!! Love how you built up all the details. Looks delicious

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    1. Thank you :) I can confirm it was indeed delicious ;)

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    2. DAVE this is JUST amazing!! what a fantastic looking cake - i love your style!! never seen malteasers like that but what neat idea!!
      youre a star hope you win your comp x

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    3. The maltesers are just a safety feature to stop people poking their eyes out on the wires ;)
      Thanks. You wait and see how bloody awesome the other entries are! lol

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  6. I've nominated you http://awannabefoodie.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/the-leibster-blog-award/

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    Replies
    1. A belated YAY! and big thank you Julia! I shall pass on nominations in the spirit of the award before Google friend connect disappears from non-google-bloggers :)

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  7. This looks super amazing, but not sure I could bear ever to cut into it Wonderful stuff.

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    1. Thank you Choclette! but I was hungry. It was quite easy ;)

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