Mothers Day Cake

For Mothers Day this year we had both Saturday breakfast (impossible to book anywhere at late notice on the Sunday morning) and Sunday afternoon tea. 

I have been dying to try this cake from Amanda at i am baker for ages.  This lady is so talented and everything she does looks amazing, so I decided to following her rose tutorial and give it a go on Sunday morning .

Although I have a great Chocolate Mud Cake recipe that I love I wanted to try something else.  So I jumped on google and started searching for something that inspired me.  I came across this recipe for Jaffa Fudge Cake, and after jumping up to make sure I had not imagined that orange that has been sitting in the bottom of my fridge for a week I decided to take the plunge. 

The recipe says to make the cake in a saucepan so it really is a one pot wonder this cake.  

For the chocolate I used leftover Lindt chocolate bunnies (you can see their ears in the pot). I reduced the amount of sugar to 1 cup (after reading the reviews) and I made 1.5 times the cake batter amount as I didn't want the cake to come out too flat.  

I loved using the fresh orange as even though it was a absolutely perfect day there was a significant chill in the air and the smell of oranges made it feel more like spring than autumn.

The cake came out beautifully (sorry forgot to take a photo of that - I was too excited to get onto the icing!).  It is an incredibly dense cake and didn't rise at all so if I was going to use this cake for decorating I would have to make several to get the height that I need.

So moving onto the icing.  I used Amanda's (i am baker) recipe for Back to Basics Buttercream.  I think I over beat it a little but the taste of this icing is beautiful and it goes slightly crisp when it dries which I really like as I think it adds to the texture.

The icing looks so fantastic that I guarantee you won't be able to resist having a 'quality control' taste!

All I can say about the roses is: practice makes perfect!

I think I did the whole cake about 3 times (pipping on the rose then scraping it off!) before I was kind of happy with the outcome.  As I said before, I think I over beat the icing, and as such I didn't get that creamy texture that Amanda seemed to have, but over all I was actually quite happy with my first attempt.

I will absolutely be trying it again as it is a very impressive looking cake for what will be very little effort (with a bit of practice that is!). 

And the taste - well that was super impressive! The dense flavour of the cake and the sweetness of the icing complemented each other perfectly and was a very well received for Mothers Day.