The Birthday Cake

I am not very good at making cakes and I rarely make a birthday cake: my boys are usually content to have a chocolate caterpillar cake from M&S. However, I promised my now 14 year old that I would make him one. I chose to make the Chocolate Malteser Cake from Nigella Lawson's book, Feast. 

The recipe seemed a little strange with only 15g of butter and resulted in a very runny mixture, but it seemed to cook fine and smells delicious. The cake mixture itself contains Horlicks to give it a malted taste. It all fell down on the icing though, as I didn't have enough icing sugar so guessed the quantity of butter needed and that too is too runny! This has resulted in a butter icing with a glazed effect and has cracked slightly when I moved it . I did put an extra spoonful of cocoa in the icing as I had run out of Horlicks.

The result was really good, very similar to a chocolate fatless sponge and not too rich. I think that leaving out the malty taste from the icing made it less sickly. I also think that it will feed more than the 6-8 that Nigella suggests - I will get twelve decent portions from mine. (A little tip is to place as many maltesers round as you want portions (within reason) and as long as you make sure everyone has a malteser on their slice, it will be fine).

If you want the recipe, you can see it at Chocolate Suze, or look it up in the Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame in Feast by Nigella Lawson.