Chocolate cassis gardening cake

I had totally lost the momentum of actually posting on here, but here I am! Quite surprised to see that I have still been getting a lot of hits despite my absense. I have actually been baking quite a lot, but I have also been so busy recently that I have rarely photographed nevermind had time to blog.

It was my Dads birthday a few weeks ago and I went home to Northern Ireland for it. I have never actually made my dad a cake so I thought this would be a good opportunity. My dad has a big allotment type thing in his garden so I decided to do a garden themed cake. One bonus of being at home was that I could collect the eggs for the cake from the chickens in the garden, although this ended up really freaking me out as one of the eggs was still really warm when I picked it up...a bit graphic.

The kind egg donor also came to check that I was putting it to good use...



Thanks Chickey

My dad has a real sweet tooth so I went for my favourite chocolate cake recipe (nigellas devils food cake recipe), but added a little twist in that I baked some Creme de Cassis (blackcurrant liqueur) into the mixture, and then also soaked some into the sponge once it was baked. I mascerated some raspberries in the cassis for some extra fruitness to the liquid, and then I put the raspberries into the middle of the cake along with some fresh raspberries.

I made a really rich chocolate ganache, it is a really simple mix of dark chocolate, butter, muscavado sugar and warm water, it makes the richest glossiest frosting which went so well with the boozy raspberries.

I wanted the decoration to be really good, but had a bit of difficulty. I have loads of gel colours at my home in Manchester, however had to rely on supermarket foodcolours for this cake and they really are a bit rubbish, they make the icing so sticky and make it very hard to mould anything with. Also I really don't like the colours, they look extremely artificial and kind of ruin the effect. However I persevered! Making all the vegetables was very fiddly but I spent a nice morning doing this with my sister Kathryn so it was actually quite fun. 

I wanted to make a soil/compost base to "plant" the vegetables on and so smashed up some oreo cookies and it turned out quite realistic. I piped green "grass" again with a substandard supermarket piping nozzle, I wasn't too happy with this, wrong colour and too big a nozzle (you can actually get nozzles specifically for piping grass) but it did the job at least.

And so here is the finished article! Its not exactly the classiest of cakes but my dad loved it, we had it brought out at the restaurant we went to and he was very surprised. It tasted pretty nice too!



Happy Garfield!



Soph x