Clown Cake

Originally this was supposed to be Brooklyn Blackout Cake.  You know, that chocolate cake coated in crumbs with the dark, seductive chocolate custard peeking through?  Clearly I was aiming for a broody classic; also quite clearly, it didn’t quite end up like that.  A brief warning: if this is the first post you’ve seen, I would just like to apologise for the poor welcome, and promise that this is the messiest cake on the site (even including the Mississippi Mud Pie.  No, that was definitely worse.)

The recipe for the icing used corn flour, and as this was a spontaneous outburst of cake making I thought that running out to Tesco would ruin my creative flow.  In other words, I didn’t fancy going out in the rain.  Besides this was the first time in a while that I was making a cake that had no specific recipients; I only had to please myself, and that meant that Mum wasn’t there to protest against bright colours.  As such I turned into a child and covered the whole thing with yellow vanilla icing and pink stripes.  I made the vanilla icing with the Hummingbird recipe, but I have to confess that I cheated with the pink.  Tom’s mum, knowing that I love pink and I love baking, bought me some pink ready-made icing.  And I hadn’t used it: until today.  Gone was my enticing chocolate vision, replaced with a colourful, fun-filled mess.  I based the colours on those Party Ring biscuits that appeared at every party you went to when you were about seven, the ones that scream ‘EAT ME BECAUSE I’M FUN!’  It looks like a seven year old decorated it; I’m willing to claim that this was the intention.

The layers of chocolate cake came out moist and crumbly, and they tasted better than I had thought they would with the vanilla icing.  There are supposed to be three layers to this cake; I was using 21cm tins instead of the recipe’s 20cm, and the mixture didn’t spread as far as I thought it would.  This didn’t make too much difference, although it would have looked cooler.

So the piping needs work and the yellow is a bit anaemic; it tasted good and my inner child was delighted.