Cakes & Cupcakes
Speckled Egg Cake
A decadent chocolate mud cake, layered with multi-coloured Swiss meringue buttercream.
This is not just an ordinary cake! It is a six-tier death by chocolate cake decorated with all the speckled eggs I could get my hands on. I am a little obsessed with speckled eggs, and if you aren't, I am questioning whether we can be friends!
Mud cakes are contentious in our household. I prefer cakes with a soft and light crumb. This mud cake, however, has a super dense and fudgy crumb, thanks to about half a kilogram of chocolate in the batter!!! Adding Swiss meringue buttercream to the otherwise dark chocolate cake helps to lend some sweetness without being cloyingly sweet.
Because it is Easter and I was feeling slightly festive, I decided to make this a speckled egg themed cake. I used the colours of the speckled eggs for the different colours of buttercream layers in the cake, and piled the speckled eggs onto the cake on the outside. I also added speckles to the cake with some cocoa and vanilla essence β super easy!
The recipe
Speckled Egg Cake
adventureswithsugar.com/speckled-egg-cake/
Method
Method: chocolate mud cake
- Preheat the oven and prepare the tins: Preheat the oven to 170Λ Celsius. Grease and line six 18cm round cake tins.
- Melt the chocolate and butter: Place the butter and chocolate in a bowl and pour over the hot coffee, to melt the chocolate and butter. Make sure everything is well melted.
- Add the sugar: Add in the sugar and mix until incorporated.
- Add the eggs and vanilla: Add in the eggs and vanilla and continue to mix.
- Fold in the flour and cocoa: Finally, add in the self-raising flour and cocoa and fold through.
- A runny batter: The batter is a liquid one, so do not worry.
- Bake: Bake for between 40 β 50 minutes, or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
- Cool and turn out: Let the cake cool in the tin for 15 minutes, before turning out onto a cooling rack to cool completely.
Method: white chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream
- Melt the chocolate: Melt the chocolate and oil in a microwave, in short 20 second bursts, and set aside to cool.
- Dissolve the sugar: Set a pot of simmering water onto the stove, on medium heat. Place a bowl over the pot of water, to create a bain marie. Place the sugar and egg whites in the bowl and stir until the sugar has dissolved into the egg white. Do not vigorously mix the mixture, as we do not want to aerate it too much. If you run a bit of the mixture between your forefinger and thumb, there should be no sugar granules.
- Whip the meringue: Transfer the sugar and egg mixture to your stand mixer (you can use an electric hand beater too) and whip for a good 10 minutes, until a glossy meringue has formed and the sides of the bowl have cooled down.
- Add the butter: Slowly add in the butter, a few cubes at a time. Let incorporate fully, before adding more. You should then have a smooth and silky buttercream.
Method: assembly
- Level the cakes: When ready to stack, fill and decorate your cake, slice off the tops of the chocolate cake so that they have flat tops.
- Colour the layer icing: Weigh out five bowls of icing, weighing 125g each. Colour them with different colours for the different layers in the cake.
- Colour the outer icing: Colour the remaining icing duck egg blue.
- Stack, fill and frost: Stack and fill the cake with the different colours of buttercream, and frost the outside.
- Mix the speckle paint: Dilute the cocoa with the vanilla essence.
- Speckle the cake: Use a soft bristled brush, holding it close to the cake and flicking this vanilla onto the cake to give it a speckled-egg look.
- Decorate: Decorate with speckled eggs and enjoy π
Comments (2)
Veronique
Iβm obsessed with your recipes! So far I have baked the saffron cake and today I am baking the gluten-free cherry cake. Cannot wait to try all of them! ππ
Suvar Baker
Hi Veronique π Awww, Iβm so glad you are enjoying them. The saffron milk cake is one of my favourites!
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