ATTENTION EVERYONE, I MADE OLAF WITH A SANTA HAT ON!!
With all the hype about Yule Logs, Christmas pudding (ew), fruit cake and other classic christmas desserts, the simple homemade non-fruit cake seems to be overlooked.
It’s my Uni house Christmas dinner tomorrow, and in honour of our last Christmas living together (thank God) we decided to make a *non-vegan* cake. Not just any cake, but a super decorated Christmas cake. I’ve never been a dab hand at baking so I did it with my friends, but decorating? Now you’re talking, I honestly think it looks amazing. It has 2 layers of chocolate with a layer of red sponge in the middle.
Ingredients and quantities for Chocolate cake: (everything bought at ASDA)
- 200g Caster Sugar
- 100g Self-Raising Flour
- 200g Unsalted Butter (room temp or else hard to mix, I speak from experience)
- 4 Eggs
- 100g Cocoa Powder
- Tsp Vanilla Extract
- Splash of milk
Easy right! For the red sponge in the middle, we just halved the above quantities, removed the cocoa powder and added red food colouring. We used natural colouring and it didn’t turn out as red as we liked, so if you can get artificial red colouring that would probably work better.
In between each layer we used cream cheese icing (delish), made by mixing cream cheese spread and icing sugar. We spread this around the entire perimeter of the cake so that it looked like snow.
For the decoration:
- Cream Cheese Spread
- Icing Sugar
- Ready-to-roll Icing (Dr Oetker Regal-Ice Ready is great, a pack of colours)
- Sprinkles (optional)
- Toothpicks
The decoration is deffo the best and most fun part, we used glittery snowflake sprinkles all over the top, then got cracking with our royal icing figures. We decided to make kind of a North Pole-esque scene, with lots of figures and presents etc. This took a while but it was super fun and we all got really into it. For future reference, I would stick toothpicks/cocktail sticks in everything while you are making them, as we didn’t and then had to impale our poor snowmen. While we were making these, we put our cake in the fridge so the icing would set slightly and make a nice steady base for our decorations. As you can see, we made a tree, snowmen, a penguin, presents, holly, a wreath, candy cane round the edge, and used some cadbury snow bites chocolate to look like they were having a snowball fight. The cool thing is that once they have been refrigerated for a bit, they go all shiny so look like they have been made with polymer clay and glazed in a kiln.
As a finishing touch, we sprinkled a dust of icing sugar over everything so it looked like it had been snowing.
Et voila! The decorating took a lot longer than making the actual cake, we probably cooked them for about 30 mins, but basically just until you stick a knife in it and it comes out clean.
Happy Baking!
