White Choc Mud Cake - Happy Birthday cake

This white choc mud cake is the second recipe I've made from my Mastering the Art of Baking book by Anneka Manning. I really love this book (lovely birthday gift from some friends) and can't wait until I'm on maternity leave and can make a lot more from it. On this occasion the cake was for my neice's birthday with some average Dora the Explorer decorations.

What you will need: 
250g White Chocolate, chopped
200g Butter, chopped
2330g (1.5 Cups) Caster Sugar
2 Eggs, room temperature
1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
150g (1 Cup) Plain Flour
150g (1 Cup) Self Raising Flour
(to decorate you will require an icing of your choice, here I used vanilla bean buttercream I blogged about here, but you would also use a buttercream)

Preheat the oven to 160Deg C and grease a 20cm square cake tin (I used a round tin).

Put the chocolate, butter and 200ml of water in a saucepan and stir over low heat until melted and combined.

Transfer to a large bowl, stir int he sugar and set aside until the mixture is lukewarm.

Add the eggs and vanilla to the chocolate mixture and use a balloon whisk to combine.

Sift the flours together over the chocolate mixture and stir in with the whisk until smooth.

Now you can just pour into your prepared tin and bake as normal, or if you want to colour your tiers like I did, split the batter evenly into three (or however many colours you want) separate bowls. Stir in your food colouring, I wanted three different shades of pink. I had to cook my tiers separately so they were individual tiers.

Bake for 1.5 hours or until cooked (test with a skewer). Cracks will appear on the top of your cake (like mine) but don't worry. Cool the cakes on wire racks until cooled.

Spread your chosen icing on top and layer the cakes accordingly, or if you have the one cake, just ice.

I rough iced my layers together and then smoothed them with a hot knife.

All the decorations are handmade (you can tell!) from fondant.

Inside the cake - the three layers of pink.

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