Baking A Homemade 18th Birthday Cake
Due to the circumstances, Cam’s 18th birthday cake became my responsibility to make. Our Nan usually gifts us a professionally made birthday cake for our birthday’s, but sadly it became impossible this year as most places were still closed, including the place we usually go. Instead, we created one at home and made it the most chocolate-y birthday cake that we could possibly have thought of for Cameron’s lockdown 18th birthday.
The problem is, in our house, our cakes never seem to rise. Every time we have made a cake, it never seems to rise much and always ends up being quite flat. We don’t know if it’s our oven, or if we seem to just lack in cake rising skills. This is why we decided to make a three tier cake instead of a two tier cake as the recipe said, so it would be a big enough size.
The ingredients for our three-layer cake were:
12oz / 337.5g unsalted butter, softened plus extra for greasing
12oz / 337.5g caster sugar
6 eggs
11.5oz / 330g self-raising flour
3tsp baking powder
2.6oz / 75g cocoa powder
Usually, we would take our time, adding the ingredients one by one and mixing them together before adding the next. This time, we followed the advice of baking queen Mary Berry, and just added all the ingredients into a bowl at the same time and then mixed them together, just until everything was combined without over beating the mix. I think this was the trick that made our cake so great this time – thanks Mary!
We only had two cake tins so we baked two of the cakes first, and then the third one once we had taken the first two out of the tin to cool. They came out great! I think they are the most risen cakes we have ever made. This meant that we had the biggest cake ever because there were three pretty thick and risen layers of chocolate cake.
We didn’t decorate them until a bit later, so kept the cakes in an air tight container until we decided it was time to decorate. I made some chocolate buttercream that I put between the layers, and around the outside. I stuck chocolate fingers all the way around the outside and melted Cadbury’s dairy milk to cover the top. I then used smarties to shape the number ‘18’ and put candles in the top. And there we had it…a cake as chocolate-y as we could make it!
Buttercream ingredients:
8oz / 250g butter
16oz / 450g icing sugar
1 ¾ oz/ 50g melted chocolate
The cake went down a treat, and because of how HUGE it was, it lasted us a fair while too! I can’t wait to do more baking soon and experiment with new recipes now I know how to make my cakes rise!
Thanks for reading! Keep smiling and have a great day! Liv xxx
