Chocolate-Speckled Easter Cake

When I said to Sunny that I was going to bake an Easter Cake last week he pulled a face and went, “Isn’t it a bit early for Easter Cakes?”  I pulled a face right back.  I mean – come on – we’ve both been scoffing mini eggs and creme eggs since they appeared on supermarket shelves way back in January.  Hey, you gotta make the most of them while they’re around, right?

Anyway, I’m pretty chuffed with how the cake turned out.  It’s a chocolate sponge (obvs) with buttercream frosting, crowned with a Wheetabix chocolate nest-full of mini eggs (in hindsight, Shredded Wheat would have probably looked better).  I had some frosting left over from Mother’s Day, so I used a bit of food colouring to turn it a sort of duck egg green, and then stirred in some grated chocolate to create a speckled egg effect.

Chocolate-Speckled Easter Cake

Ingredients

• 175g Butter
• 100g Caster Sugar
• 190g Self Raising Flour
• 100ml Milk
• 35g Drinking Chocolate Powder (I’ve always used drinking chocolate over cocoa powder for my chocolate cakes – I prefer the taste!)
• 3 eggs

1. Set the oven to 180° and grease a deep cake tin (I used a reasonably small one).
2. Cream together the butter and sugar in a bowl, then gradually whisk in the eggs.
3. Stir in the flour and drinking chocolate powder, and then gradually add the milk to form a light and fluffy batter.
4. Bake for one hour, or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean.
5. Allow to cool completely, then slice into three layers and sandwich with buttercream.

*The quantity of buttercream you’ll need will depend on the size of your cake.  To make the butter cream, generally speaking, for every 100g of butter, you use 200g of icing sugar.  

*To make the nest: stir melted chocolate into crushed Shredded Wheat or Wheetabix, then while wet, form into a nest shape on top of the cake.  I used two Wheetabix Bricks and half a big bar of Dairy Milk Chocolate.

What are your favourite Easter chocolates?  I’ve gone through about twenty family sized bags of mini eggs already.  🙂