Chocolate lover's birthday cake - September 2014

Otis' birthday this week. Otis loves cake. He especially loves chocolate cake.  

Inspired by my visit to Julie's House in Ghent last week (gorgeousness!), I wanted to have some fun combining fillings, flavours and textures. 

I baked 3 different kinds of chocolate cake, and made a 4 layer cake comprised of
(from bottom to top):

chocolate fudge cake, 

dark choc buttercream, 

dark choc and beetroot cake,

dark chocolate ganache, 

orange jelly (Jaffa cake style), 

red velvet cake, 

white choc buttercream, 

chocolate fudge cake, 

dark choc buttercream, 

dark chocolate ganache, 

salted caramel and hazelnut crumbs.  

I surrounded the layers with a sheet of vanilla sponge to help stabilise the cake on it's journey (plus a central dowel), and covered the sides in choc buttercream.  

To assemble, I lined an 8" tin with card, cling film and waxed paper 

I put vanilla sheet cake around the sides, spread chocolate buttercream on it and started stacking 6" layers inside.  

I used the waxed paper to stop the sheet cake from collapsing in during the stacking process.

The orange layer I made by reducing orange juice with orange zest and sugar and setting with vege geletine substitute (all my cakes are vege).

Once stacked, I chilled the cake before I took the supports away.

Each layer of cake, and the vanilla sheet cake, were doused in vanilla syrup during assembly.

I covered the whole thing with a crusting chocolate buttercream and topped with ganache.

Plan number one was to top with Italian meringue, which looked fine on paper, but actually I didn't like the look of it and overnight the meringue started to leak sugar syrup which dripped down the side 

I have since looked this up in "Bakewise" and maybe my syrup wasn't quite hot enough when I poured it into the egg whites.  Had it been on another surface it would not have been visible, but as the ganache under it was a impenetrable barrier so it came out sideways instead. 

Anyway, it looked wrong, so I changed my mind, made more salted hazelnut brittle and blitzed it for the top.

I also wasn't keen on the overall dimensions (I must have made the fillings thicker than I'd planned) so I chopped off the bottom layer of the originally 5 layer cake and made it 4 layers.

The topper I made from craft foam.

I took the cake with me to the restaurant where we all had a great meal and Otis managed to get 28 candles on top without setting fire to himself.  

Happy birthday gorgeous.  You are a very, very loved.

xxxx