Caramac cake

My mum’s birthday was this week and we went out for a birthday meal on Thursday to celebrate, I asked the pub ahead of time if I could bring a cake which they agreed to. My mum loves Caramac bars so I decided to make her a vanilla and chocolate swirl cake with Caramac decorations.

The most challenging part of this cake was finding a lot of Caramac at a reasonable price, with supermarkets wanting £1.50 per bar and shops online catering more to wholesale (I didn’t need 25 or 50 bars of Caramac!). I eventually found the bars at 3 for £1 in our local pound shop. 🙂

The meal was lovely! They were holding a grill and steak night, I had roast garlic chicken breast with peppercorn sauce and chips. There was also garlic bread and salad to share as sides. My mum had cumberland sausage (pictured below) and dad had a steak. My sister and her friend came to the meal and Ryan joined us all later after work. It was a really good evening. 🙂

For the cake, I used the same recipe as the Star Trek cake I made for my dad’s birthday in July, you can find it below. Along with how I decorated the cake.

You will need

For the cake:

• 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 20 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 teaspoon water
• 35g coca powder

For the frosting:

• 2 cup unsalted butter, softened (but not melted)
• 5 cups confectioners (powdered) sugar
• 1 teaspoon table salt
• 4 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 4 tablespoons water

To decorate:

• Caramac bars
• Salted caramel

Method

For the cake:

Preheat your oven to 180ºC

Combine together the flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

Add the butter and beat until creamy and smooth.

Add the granulated sugar and continue beating until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla and water until smooth and creamy.

Remove 8 tbsp of the mixture and place in a smaller bowl and set aside.

Pour the cake batter into your cake pan.

Combine the coca powder with the mixture you set aside and stir well. Then spoon this into the mixture in the tin and using a rounded knife, gently swirl through.

Note: You can also swirl it in the bowl itself but you’ll also need to re-swirl once it’s in the cake pan.

Bake until the cake is lightly golden and slightly firm, for about 30-40 minutes.
Leave to cool then transfer to a wire rack.

For the frosting:

Cream the butter until creamy.

Add the confectioners (powdered) sugar into the mixing bowl and stir well.

Frost the cake (I used a pallet knife) and smooth over it. I used two coats.

Cut up the Caramac bars and place around the edge of the cake, I used 28 in total.

I had thought to melt up the remaining Caramac bars and use that for the drizzle, however after speaking with Ryan agreed with him that this may have been too overpowering. So we used salted caramel and broken pieces of Caramac and grated Caramac on top, afterwards we decided to melt up some of the Caramac and had a little Caramac drizzle too.

Viola!

Mum really liked it.

On Saturday we should be out for more celebrating as most of us were at work on the Thursday. 🙂