Lesley's Birthday Cake

It is my good friend, Lesley's birthday on the 13th May, but last Saturday we celebrated her 'big' day with her.  Of course, a cake was in order.

As she is a massive fan of Revels, and I mean MASSIVE, it had to be a cake with a Revel theme.

I decided on a brown and gold colourscheme.

I made a chocolate sponge (I always weigh my eggs and match the rest of the ingredients to them)

So, I used:

• 8oz eggs (4 medium eggs)
• 8oz softened butter
• 8oz caster sugar
• 6.5oz SR flour  (If making a plain cake then this would be 8oz, but I was adding cocoa powder too)
• 1.5oz cocoa powder  
• Splash of vanilla essence

There is no real method as I honestly just chuck it all in the bowl and shove the electric hand whisk in until it's thoroughly mixed.

Pour into a lined cake tin, Gas 5 for ......hmm, I dunno, an hour or so, until you can poke in a skewer and it comes out clean.  You could put it into two smaller sandwich cake tins which would lessen the cooking time.

I decided to decorate this with a big squish of Nutella Icing.

For that you need:

• 500g of softened butter
• 1kg icing sugar
• small jar of Nutella chocolate & hazelnut spread

This time there is a little bit of a method, if only to save you getting showered in a haze of powdered sugar, the blooming stuff gets everywhere.

• With your electric mixers whisk up your butter, add half the icing sugar, whisk, add the rest, whisk, add the Nutella, whisk. Job done!

And this is the cake.  I cut it in half and added a generous swish of icing, then slathered it all over the top and sides.  I added Cadbury's chocolate fingers (3 boxes) all around the edge and Revels (2 family sized bags) to the top, pressing them down slightly so they didn't roll back off.

Then it was a mad dash up to Hobbycraft to buy ribbon to wrap around it, gold sprinkles to add some gold colour, and a 50th diamanté stick thing to shove in the centre.

I decided that the diamanté thing wasn't quite enough, so Marie and Shona helped by cutting gold hearts out of card and sticking them on wire to make a wonderful spray.

We took the cake to the pub, where they delivered it to her table with a chorus of "Happy Birthday"  :)

Of course, the beauty of having a Revel based birthday cake is that no one want to share it with you for fear of getting THE COFFEE ONE !!