SALTED CARAMEL AND HONEYCOMB BLOGIVERSARY CAKE
January 30, 2018
Sharkett Sisters is now two years old!
We can't believe how time has flown! Its been one year since we moved to London and two years since we started this blog!
We are so thankful for all of the views and support you guys give us! We hope you still love seeing our baking and fashion posts as much as we love making them. We see no sight of this slowing down and in fact want to make this the best year ever for our blog, so make sure you keep following our posts!
To celebrate our blog birthday we of course had to make a super exciting cake!
We took this absolutely divine flavour combination from some incredible cookie dough from Naked Dough in Westfield. It was heavenly and we have no idea how it took us so long to discover the combination! We've wanted to make a honeycomb cake for a while, we love the cute icing bees and the amazing honeycomb chocolate. We think it looks so impressive and really effective! Chocolate cake was definitely the best choice to go with these flavours so we decided to mix things up a bit and stray from our usual chocolate cake recipe. Instead we used Mary Berrys Death by Chocolate recipe as we've heard great things. And of course it is complete indulgence! It is the spongiest cake, and just delicious!
Ingredients...
For the Cake...
(makes 2 sponges)
10oz plain flour
3tbsp cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
7 1/2oz caster sugar
3tbsp golden syrup
3 large eggs
8floz sunflower oil
8floz milk
For the Salted Caramel Sauce...
75g butter
50g brown sugar
50g caster sugar
50g golden syrup
125ml double cream
1tsp salt
For the buttercream...
20oz icing sugar
10oz butter
salted caramel sauce
For the decoration...
200g white chocolate
100g dark chocolate
3 Cadbury crunchies
yellow, black and white icing for the bees (optional)
honeycomb broken into shards
honeycomb broken into shards
We made these little icing bees a couple of days before we made the cake, as they need time to dry out a little. If you have the time (and patience) to make these little cuties, we think they make a very cute addition to the cake. We also added shards of honeycomb, it's fun and easy to make, and there are plenty of recipes online to choose from.
We wanted to have 3 layers to our cake so added another third of the ingredients - this made it easier than adding another half since we didn't want to be halving eggs! This gave 3 deep layers we would definitely recommend this.
Start by preheating the oven to 160°C/140°C Fan/Gas Mark 3 and grease and line your cake tins. Take a large mixing bowl and sift in the flour, cocoa powder, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder. Then, mix in the sugar. Make a well in the centre of the bowl and add the golden syrup, eggs, oil and milk. Beat using a wooden spoon until fully combined and smooth. Separate the cake mixture evenly between the cake tins and then bake in the oven for around 35 mins, or until springy to the touch. Once out of the oven, leave to cool completely on a wire rack.
Whilst your cake is in the oven, you can start making the salted caramel sauce so that it has time to cool down before making your buttercream. You could even do this the day before and keep it in the fridge. Start by melting the butter, sugars and syrup in a pan and then once fully melted, let it simmer for around 3 minutes. Add the cream and salt, and simmer for one more minute and you're done! You can add more salt later if necessary. Transfer the sauce to a bowl and leave in the fridge to cool.
Next step is making the chocolate shards!
You will need to temper the chocolate so that it stays shiny and hard at room temperature. The temperatures differ slightly for the different chocolate so make sure you follow the right ones.
Start by chopping up the chocolate into small pieces and placing about 1/4 into the fridge. Melt the other 3/4 either in the microwave or over a pan of hot water and bring it up to 55-58°C for the dark chocolate and 45-50°C for the white. When it reaches this temperature, quickly take it off the heat, add your finely chopped frozen chocolate and stir to reduce the temperature down to 28-29°C for dark and for white 26-27°C as quickly as possible. If you need a little help stand your bowl of melted chocolate into a bowl filled with cold water (not too cold though), it really speeds up the process. When you have it down to the required temperature, you want to bring it back up to 31-32°C for dark and 28-29°C for white. Make sure not to heat it up any higher or you will have to start all over again.
Spread the dark chocolate thinly onto a lined baking tray, optionally adding sprinkles and then put aside to set for around 30 mins.
To make the honeycomb shards you will need a clean piece of bubble wrap, with the least amount of popped bubbles you can find. Spread the white chocolate thinly over the bubble wrap, just thin enough that the bubbles are becoming visible then put aside to set.
To make the buttercream, simply beat the butter until light and fluffy. Beat in around half of the salted caramel sauce (only when cool!) and then slowly beat in the icing sugar one big spoonful at a time. You may need to add more icing sugar if the buttercream is not thick enough at this point but just keep adding one spoonful at a time until you get the right consistency.
Now you should have all the pieces of your cake ready, it's time to start assembling! If any of your cakes aren't level just take a knife and level them off before you go any further, or it will make your buttercream very difficult to get smooth!
Take your first layer of cake and spread on a nice thick layer of buttercream, then sprinkle about 1 bars worth of crushed Crunchie on top. If you are having three layers then continue to do the same with the next layer.
Create a crumb coating around your cake by thinly spreading buttercream all around the edges and on the top of cake. This doesn't need to be thick it just needs to trap all the crumbs so that the next layer will be crumb free. Try to keep the edges as straight as possible.
After leaving the first layer to set for at least 10 minutes, you can spread on the next layer. Using the rest of the buttercream, completely cover the cake as thinly or thickly as you would like.
Once you have let the final layer of buttercream dry for a few minutes, it's time to add the salted caramel drip. If you feel that your salted caramel sauce is not thick enough then just add a few spoonfuls of icing sugar until it is. This will depend on how long it was left to simmer and how long it has been been cooling before use. Start with the sauce in the middle and slowly push it to the edges allowing it to drip over.
The final step is to decorate! You can do this however you want but we went for a slight cascade down one side. Poke your chocolate and honeycomb shards into the cake, and sprinkle with crushed Crunchie pieces.
This is a super indulgent cake, best served with a cup of tea! We are so in love with the flavour combination of honeycomb and salted caramel and it goes perfectly with a chocolate sponge.
Thank you so much for reading this post!
And thank you so much for all your support and views over the past year!
We're eager to make this our best year yet, and we would love for you to join us!
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Lots of love,
Antonia and Imogen x
