Chippy Cakes

Chocolate and Caramel Layer Cake

Monday 6 February 2012

Last Tuesday, I baked a cake for my friend's 21st birthday. It was a Chocolate and Caramel Layer Cake! Not gonna lie, it took a very long time to make as the cake consisted of 4 humongous layers! It was worth it in the end since it looked and tasted amazing + I got lots of help from all of my flatmates. :)

Ingredients:
For Vanilla & Chocolate Sponges

225g soft butter, plus extra for greasing
225g golden caster sugar
175g self-raising flour
85g ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
150ml pot natural yoghurt
1 tsp vanilla extract
5 tsp cocoa powder

For Caramel & Caramel-Choc Sponges

225g soft butter, plus extra for greasing
175g light muscovado sugar
50g dark muscovado sugar
175g self-raising flour
85g ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
150ml natural yoghurt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp cocoa

For Filling and Topping:

140g dark chocolate
140g milk chocolate
300ml double cream
100g white chocolate, grated
347g can of caramel

I know, I know, there's plenty of ingredients in this cake. Heck, this certainly is not for those on a diet! But, maybe a slice or two wouldn't hurt...

Method:

Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Grease and line bases of 2 x 20cm sandwich tins with baking parchment.
For the Vanilla & Chocolate sponges, mix all the ingredients, apart from the cocoa, together with an electric whisk (or by hand vigorously). Scrape half the mix into a second bowl and whizz in the cocoa. Scrape into the tins and bake for 20-25 mins until a skewer poked in comes out clean.
Repeat step 1 for the Caramel & Caramel-Choc sponges, again leaving cocoa out of the first mixing, then splitting the mix in half and whizzing the cocoa into one batch. Cook as above.
While sponges are cooling, melt the dark and milk chocolate together in a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Remove from the heat, stir in the cream and cool or chill until spreadable.
When the sponges are cool, spread a third of the caramel over the Vanilla sponge and top with the Caramel sponge. Spread over another third of the caramel and top with the Caramel-choc sponge, then the final third of caramel and top with the Chocolate sponge.
Spread the chocolate icing over the whole cake to serve. Sprinkle the sides with the grated white chocolate.

And, here you go! This is what the inside of your cake should look like... Well, kinda! I made a big mistake myself by mixing up the second and third layer! But it still tasted good, nonetheless, so it's not that big of a deal if you mix up the layers too. The cake should still look great when you cut it in. I do apologise for the low quality phone pictures.

This is one hell of a tall cake! It is my proudest cake so far. For those of you that do not like caramel as a filling, you can use condensed milk as an alternative. One more thing to keep in mind is that sprinkling the white chocolate part could get a bit messy! And if you do not leave the cake to set for a couple of hours, they may come off and make a little mess on the side... Enjoy!

2 comments