Every year I always try and do a special Easter bake for my family, and this year was no different, despite (unfortunately), not being able to see my Grandma and rest of the family in North Wales.
Ingredients
For the cake:
- usually the difficult part of trying to work out how much cake to make!!
- 10 oz / 250g Caster Sugar
- 10 oz / 250g Stork Margarine
- 5 eggs
- 2 tsp Vanilla Extract
- 10 oz / 250g Self Raising Flour
- 2 tsp Baking Powder
- 5 different colours of Food Colouring Gel (& gel is the best to use)
For the buttercream icing:
- 125g Butter
- 250g Icing Sugar
- A Splash of Milk (around 5/6 tbsp)
Decoration:
- 100g Chocolate of your choice (I used my favourite, which is Cadbury’s, I decided to use their ‘Darkermilk’ chocolate)
- 1 bag of Mini Eggs
Method
For the cake:
- Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/ 180
- (If you use a food processor just whack it all in and mix it up in there – NOT the food colouring together, obviously!)
- Cream the butter and the sugar together in a bowl.
- Beat in the eggs and vanilla extract to the mixture.
- Sift in the flour and baking powder, add it in a bit of a time and fold the mixture.
- Now, this is where it gets fun! Evenly distribute the cake mix into 5 different bowls and colour each – I used red, orange, yellow, green and red & green because I had less colours than I thought!!
- Pour each coloured mixture into individual tins (or 1 tin and repeat 5 times if you only have one like me!!).
- Bake for 15 minutes.
- Take out and do the skewer test to check it’s ready and leave to cool.
For the buttercream icing:
- Beat the butter so it’s very soft (or else the icing sugar will go EVERYWHERE!!)
- Add in the icing sugar and mix together until it’s all combined.
- Add in milk as appropriate – soft and spreadable but not too runny (hopefully that makes sense!!).
Assembling the cake:
- I always put a little bit of buttercream icing on the base of the cake stand so it won’t mover everywhere!
- Place down the first layer of cake, spoon on 1-2 dessertspoon/tablespoons of buttercream, use a pallet knife (ideally) to spread across the cake base.
- Repeat with the other 4 cakes.
- Once all is assembled, do a crumb coating of the cake. To do this just blob on a few spoons of buttercream around the cake and in between the layers, you don’t need very much at all, just a light covering of the sponge. TIP: A scraper is really useful to get a good finish on the cake.
- Leave buttercream to set for a couple hours or so.
- Now, you could do another layer of buttercream icing, or, if like me you don’t have a great supply of butter because ASDA was short of it, just leave it as it is and move onto the next step.
- Next I opened my chocolate bar and mini eggs and melted the chocolate bar. This next bit was a bit tricky, but I decided to pipe the chocolate to create the drip effect. I poured the chocolate into a piping bag and very slowly and carefully moved around the cake, piping a bit more in some areas and a bit less in some areas. I also had enough chocolate to cover the entire top of the cake, which I really liked the look of actually.
- Finally, the finishing touch! I dotted mini eggs around the cake, and with the leftover ones (minus the couple I nibbled at) I bashed them up and sprinkled them in the middle!
Happy baking!
Love Ailsa xxx