Chocolate Mud Cake for Swee's birthday

 

Today is my colleague, Swee's, 40th birthday.  To celebrate this momentous occasion, I have made her a birthday cake.

 

Because I needed to make it a few days in advance, I chose a chocolate mud cake:

 

 

which I then topped with ganache once cool: 

 

and covered with black ready to roll fondant icing:

 

To make the cake pretty, I used some Lucky coloured fondant to make some daisies and put numbers on the cake: 

I then added a sausage of coloured fondant around the bottom edge of the cake to finish it off:

covering the join with a bow:

Voila!  I am very happy with this cake.

The recipe for the chocolate mud cake comes from A Cook's Book of Decadence - Chocolate, Coffee, Caramel, which my friends Elisa and Trudy gave to me for my birthday one year.  It is as follows:

250g butter
250g dark cooking chocolate
2 tablespoons instant coffee powder or granules
150g self-raising flour
150g plain flour
60g cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
550g sugar
4 eggs
2 tablespoons olive oil
125ml buttermilk

Preheat your oven to 160 degrees Celsius.  Grease a deep 23cm round cake tin, and line the base and sides with baking paper, making sure the paper extends ~ 5cm above the top of the tin.

Dissolve the coffee in 185mls hot water. Put the butter, sugar, chocolate and dissolved coffee and water in a saucepan. Stir over a low heat until smooth, completely melted and blended. Set aside.

Sift the flours, cocoa and bicarbonate of soda into a large bowl. Make a well in the centre.

Add the combined eggs, oil and milk; pour into the well in the dry ingredients, and using a spatula, mix well into the dry ingredients. Add  the cooled melted chocolate mixture, and fold in until there are no lumps.  

Pour the mixture into the prepared cake tin. Place the cake into the preheated oven and bake for 1 hour and 45 minutes or until cooked through when tested with a skewer. Leave the cake in its tin on a wire rack o cool completely before decorating.

For the ganache, I used Poh's ganache from her Totally Unicorn Chocolate Cake recipe, found here.

Here are the birthday girl and I with the cake:

I also cross-stitched Swee a birthday card - after all, it's a milestone birthday: