I had no idea it was National Chocolate Cake Day on the same day as Mr S’ birthday! It was a huge coincidence that I was baking him a chocolate flavoured birthday cake this year for him instead of the Lockdown brownies he got last year.

I love baking chocolate cakes (and eating them, too for that matter!) It had been a very busy week at both work and home and I couldn’t wait for the weekend. Although I do an online food shop once a week and a small top up shop, I forgot to buy a tub of sour cream. Why sour cream? Well, the chocolate cake recipe I use contains sour cream both in the actual cake and in the icing. I really thought I should have been more organised this week but it was a case of me dropping most of the balls I was juggling!

I looked through all my recipe books for a great chocolate cake recipe and came across a Devil’s Food Cake recipe in The Great British Bake Off Book Of Amazing Cakes. I absolutely love this book and back in 2020 set myself a challenge of baking all the recipes in the book. Although I’ve baked lots of the recipes (the last being the Ultimate Chocolate Cake back in October 2021), I felt that a few recipes wouldn’t be appropriate or I wouldn’t get round to making them. After all, there’s no point in me making a three tier wedding cake when I’m not really going to be eating that for pudding.

The Devil’s Food Cake recipe was perfect for Mr S’ cake as it did use double cream. I did have some of that in the fridge. The sponge was made with cocoa powder and didn’t need loads of chocolate. Having said that, I needed dark chocolate for the ganache which was to fill and ice the whole cake.

The recipe is actually by Paul Hollywood and is to be found on the Great British Bake Off website. I have shared a link to it here!

https://thegreatbritishbakeoff.co.uk/recipes/all/paul-hollywood-devils-food-cake/

Although the recipe shows how you can make additional chocolate shard decorations, I chose to decorate Mr S’ birthday cake with some of his favourite chocolates. I put a selection of Celebrations, some Lindt D’or Boules, some Salted Caramel Cups and some mini pieces of chocolate covered honeycomb on the top of his cake. I bought him a personalised Happy Birthday cake topper from Ebay. I didn’t add his age onto it as I knew he wouldn’t be happy about that!

The cake itself was an absolute pleasure to make and didn’t take that long to decorate. We finally got to have a slice on Saturday afternoon and I have to say it tasted much better than expected. The ganache made it really special.

Happy Baking!

Love Sam xx