Friday, November 16, 2007

Chocolate stripe cake - redux


It has been quite some time since my friends and I did the dizzy round of 21st birthday parties, and I hadn't expected to attend one again. However, life is often surprising, and one of the guys that I work with, Andrew, has kindly invited our entire team at work to attend his 21st birthday party in a couple of weeks time.


Although his party is not for a couple of weeks (after his exams for this year are a distant nightmare), it was Andrew's actual birthday on Thursday. What now seems like a lifetime ago, I made Zinnur's chocolate stripe cake for the king of striped shirts and chocolate, Tim. Andrew loved this cake and requested it for his birthday cake. How could I refuse? So I whipped out a sinful 400g of chocolate and an ocean of cream to dress up the surprisingly low fat base cakes (none of which contain an ounce of butter).



This time, I cooked the sponge rolls for a little too long, and consequently lost the edges to crispness. They also were not as easy to roll up as they should have been. The resulting cake was therefore a little smaller than last time, but we still had plenty of cake to go around.



I coloured some ready made fondant for the decorations. I could not find a ready made plastic key or a key-shaped cutter anywhere (have these gone out of vogue as tokens of turning 21??), so I washed up an ordinary house key and used it as a template to cut out the key. Finally, I pressed grated chocolate around the sides of the cake. It took almost as long to make the decorations as to make the whole cake (did I mention that I hate grating anything, including chocolate!?!).




I also finally took a picture of the inside of this cake (after 3 attempts) which is clear enough to show the chocolate stripe cake in all its glory. (Thanks to Simon for his assistance with the photography - I have learnt quite a lot about my camera that I didn't know before!) Now you know why this cake has the "wow" factor when people cut into it, not expecting to see the beautiful stripey pattern made in such a simple manner.




Happy 21st Andrew - I look forward to your party!

5 comments:

Thistlemoon said...

That sounds like a wonderful cake! Yummy! I am sure your friend Andrew appreciated how much time and effort you put into creating his birthday cake.

Elle said...

Thanks for swinging by my site! I'm enjoying perusing your recipes and taking some notes... I'll be back often!

Cakelaw said...

Thanks Jen - Andrew was very gracious. Hi Miss Eliza, please feel free to drop by anytime - I have also enjoyed reading some of your other posts.

Chef Jeena said...

Hey you can make me a birthday cake anytime! It looks soooo delicious! :)

Cakelaw said...

Would love to Jeena ;)