It was our friends birthday so we took the opportunity to make an epic cake and decided to make a salted caramel chocolate cake. We took inspiration from a number of recipes including this Jamie Oliver one.
The beauty about this cake is that you can make as many tiers as you would like and decorate it how you like. We decided to do 3 tiers. The recipe below makes 2 tiers, so to make a third tier we just halved the recipe. We then sandwiched the cakes with salted caramel. We then completely covered the cake with salted caramel butter icing. We had so much icing left that we added cocoa powder to the icing to turn the icing chocolately and piped this on as decoration.
Cake Ingredients
250g unsalted butter
250g dark chocolate
150ml espresso
250 self-raising flour
2tbsp cocoa powder
250g light brown soft sugar
250g golden caster sugar
100ml buttermilk
4 free range eggs
Salted Caramel ingredients
200g golden caster sugar
50g butter
75ml double cream
½ tsp salt
Icing ingredients
150g butter
350g icing sugar
100g carnation caramel
50ml whole milk
Pinch sea salt
50g cocoa powder
Method:
1) Preheat the oven to 150c and grease and line 2 cake tins
2) Melt the chocolate and butter in a bowl over water and then add the coffee.
3) In a large mixing bowl, using a hand mixer or free standing mixer beat together the flour, sugars and cocoa.
4) Add the buttermilk to the chocolate and mix. Beat the eggs with a fork in a jug and then add to the melted chocolate. Our mixer was very lumpy so we mixed it with an electric hand mixer.
5) Pour the chocolate mixture into the dry mixture and beat until combined, then pour into the prepared tins
6) Cook for 45 minutes in the oven, or until a skewer comes out clean.
7) While the cakes a cooling make the salted caramel by placing the sugar in a large saucepan with 50ml water and gently heat over a low heat, swirling it to ensure it doesn’t stick.
8) Turn the heat up and let the mixer simmer until you have a dark caramel. Cube the butter and whisk into the caramel with the cream until you have a smooth mixture, then add the salt.
9) Build your cake putting the salted caramel in between the layers
10) To make the icing whizz all the ingredients, except the cocoa powder together, you may need to add more milk. Cover the cake with the icing, you will not use it all.
11) With the remaining icing add cocoa powder to it and whizz together and use this icing as decoration.
12) Decorate the cake however you please, the bigger the better!
This cake took us 2 days to make and was so much fun! We had such fun decided firstly what kind of cake we wanted to make and had even more fun adapting the recipe to suit our needs. We also loved licking the bowl (who doesn’t), and decorating the cake too. There are so many ideas on Pinterest for epic cakes and I am sure we will be making another one soon!
Share with us your amazing cakes, we would love to see them!