Success! Chocolate Truffle Cake...

After two days of tears and tantrums, I finally managed to come up with a Chocolate Truffle Cake to be proud of.  This cake took a lot out of me - it was the first time I had attempted the recipe and after my failure on Thursday I was determined it wouldn't get the better of me.  Yesterday I took my time, followed the recipe to the letter and here is the finished result!  This was my first time icing a cake with chocolate ganache, so it took a bit of practise with the palette knife - but I got there in the end.

You can buy fancy icing turntables to help you when you're decorating cakes.  I have a "lazy susan" that I use for icing mine (you can see it in the photograph below) - I picked it up second-hand in the charity shop for a couple of pounds and it has been such a fantastic addition to my stash of cake-making equipment.  I found it particularly useful on this occasion as with the ganache, I needed to turn the cake often to get as smooth a finish as possible.

The recipe for this cake came from the Great British Bake Off "Showstoppers" book, which I received from my lovely husband for Christmas.  I replaced the flour with gluten-free flour and added a little baking powder too for good measure.  My first attempt used real butter, but for my second I used Utterly Butterly spread - who knows if this made any difference, but my second attempt certainly worked out better!

I had dowels left over from making my wedding cake back in 2011, so I used those to stack the 6" cake on top of the 8" cake and finished off with a final layer of ganache.

The birthday party is today - I'm sure my Nana will love her birthday cake.  You may remember the parcel cake I made her last year.  Each birthday I like to try something bigger and better!  Goodness knows what I'm going to do next year for her 80th!!

I've certainly had enough of baking for a while after two days in the kitchen stressing over this - so there will be no more cakes for a while!

Best Wishes
Debbie