The urge to bake overtook me last week, I had been inspired by my pinterest feed when I saw this pic:
Unfortunately I couldn’t get the recipe without subscribing and paying the site, which is fair enough, I suppose, but I didn’t feel like paying for a recipe when I was just having some fun baking at home.
I decided instead to make my own version so I looked up a simple chocolate cake recipe and then made my own cherry flavoured buttercream icing and, as usual, it started off disastrously.
I followed the normally reliable BBC Good Food’s website and a recipe that was literally called; easy chocolate cake. And let me tell you, it was not easy, it called for oil instead of butter, and it did not produce chocolate cake. Instead it produced sunken burnt sponge bowls that smelt weirdly of popcorn.
At this point I would normally have given up and packed the mixer away for another day, but whilst the disaster cakes had been burning in the oven, I had been making cherry flavoured buttercream icing, and shock! Horror! It had actually turned out rather well!
I had used this recipe to make the base of the icing and then I added a generous dollop of ASDA’s Very Special Cherry preserve. It turned the icing a lovely pink colour and gave it a cherry rich taste.
In fact the icing had turned out so well I decided to bake a fresh cake that would be worthy of such a delicious topping.
For round two I used this recipe from House and Garden that was actually easy, and the result was pretty flawless;
Just look at that beautiful cake! I then employed Rob to slice it in half using the old fishing wire technique which he executed with precision resulting in two level halves.
Then it was just a case of putting the cake and icing together and topping off with some chocolate curls:
And voila! Chocolate and cherry cake ready for devouring! It tasted lovely and sweet, in fact I liked it so much that I ended up having some for breakfast the next day! But that can be our little secret!