I am thrilled to say Brian’s birthday cake went well! Better still it was delicious! We also had a wonderful couple of days with a trip out to a Garden Show at Stanstead Park and lots of putting our feet up in the sunshine!
I promised you pictures of Brian’s Birthday cake. I followed this design from the BBC, yes it’s a Digger cake !
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/digger-cake
Brian is fan of diggers, especially the big yellow ones! I was thrilled to find these toys diggers on Amazon, they are plastic so easy to wash before and after getting covered in chocolate buttercream.
I used a Mary Berry Chocolate Victoria Sandwich and my favourite buttercream recipe below, you also need 9 packs of 4 finger kitkats and a tube of smarties. I have to say I bought 3 tubes, thinking one wouldn’t be enough but it was.
Best Chocolate Buttercream
250g Butter
250g Icing sugar ( Make sure to sift it)
150g Milk Chocolate
40g Cocoa Powder (Make sure to sift it)
1/2tsp Vanilla bean paste or Extract
- Melt the chocolate over a double boiler and then pour into another bowl to cool. It needs to be liquid but not warm when you add it to the butter cream.
- Beat the butter until soft, mix in the Vanilla Bean paste or extract.
- Then add the cocoa powder and icing sugar a few spoons at a time. I never used to sieve my icing sugar, seriously the difference in the texture is WELL worth the extra 2 minutes to sift it !!!!!! Covering the mixer with a tea towel will help the spray of sugar everywhere.
- Pour the cooled chocolate into the mixer and beat until well mixed.
- The buttercream should be smooth and soft and spreadable, if it’s too stiff add a drop of milk and beat again.
This quantity of icing made enough to top, fill and coat the two 8″ cakes. You first have to cut a big hole in the top of one of the cakes.
Then snap and stack the kitkats. Making the top surface look like mud. This is so easy…
I stamped a greeting and stuck it to two cocktail sticks and added smarties and the diggers and dumper truck.
I am very pleased to say the birthday boy was impressed!
As planned, we had fish and chips at the beach. It was a tad windy so we tried out a new cafe with glass wind breaks. The best of all worlds, outside by the sea. It was a scrummy as it looks! and the view was fab as always.
That is all from me for now, I have some more chocolate cake to eat!
I’ll be back tomorrow with Craft and Chat on my Facebook page. I hope to see you then!
June 2021
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