Happy Birthday to me,

Happy Birthday to me,

Happy Birthday to me-eeeee,

Happy Birthday to me.

It’s my birthday this weekend (did you guess?) and since every other member of my family gets spoilt with a gorgeous cake, this year I decided to take matters into my own hands. I bought a giant cupcake mould a few weeks ago and my 4 year old decided I should make my birthday cake with it, “with a cherry on top”. I decided against the cherry but I did make a giant cupcake.

A couple of tips for these moulds:

• Bake the two halves separately – the smaller top section cooks faster than the large base and you don’t want to have to resort to oven gloved gymnastics to get the top section out (like I did!)
• Butter and flour the tins so the cakes turn out easily, if you just use butter you run the risk of the cake sticking and pulling apart when you try to turn it out.

I wanted to make something a bit different so I adapted a basic sponge recipe into a peach and raspberry ripple sponge cake. As well as a raspberry coulis I needed some dried peach pieces for the mix.

To make the dried peach pieces:

1 tin of peach slices in fruit juice

I couldn’t find them in the supermarket so I drained some tinned peaches (in fruit juice not syrup), dried them with kitchen towel, chopped them and oven dried them at 50c for about an hour. The pieces were still juicy in the middle but the outsides were dry enough that they wouldn’t make the cake batter go soggy.

To make the raspberry coulis:

225g fresh raspberries

50g castor sugar

50ml water

• Place the ingredients in a pan and cook on a medium heat, stirring occasionally until the raspberries have broken down into a smooth sauce.
• Pass through a sieve to remove the seeds and leave to cool.

To make the cake:

(According to the instructions that came with the tin it needed a 6 egg mix.)

375g castor sugar

375g unsalted butter (softened)

6 large eggs (beaten)

2 tablespoons peach schnapps

375g self raising flour

several tablespoons of whole milk (until the mix drops easily from a spoon)

dried peach pieces (method above)

raspberry coulis (method above)

• Preheat the oven to 170c
• Butter the base side of the giant cupcake tin and dust with flour to stop the cake sticking.
• In a free-standing electric mixer cream the softened butter and sugar.
• Mix the peach schnapps with the beaten eggs
• Slowly add half the egg mixture to the buttercream while mixing on a low speed.
• Add a few spoonfuls of the flour to help stabilise the batter and stop it splitting.
• Slowly add the remaining egg mix whil mixing on a low speed.
• Add the rest of the flour a spoonful at a time while mixing at a low speed.
• Add the milk in 2 tablespoonfuls at a time, mixing by hand until the batter drops easily off a spoon.
• Stir in the dried peach pieces.
• Use 2/3s of the coulis and keep 1/3 to serve with the cake – fold through the batter very gently to create a ripple effect.
• Use about 2/3s of the batter in the bottom half of the giant cupcake mould, keep the rest back to cook the top later. (I baked both at the same time and had all sorts of fun getting the top part out when it was baked while leaving the bottom part in the tin to continue baking).
• Bake in a 170c oven for about an hour (check at 50 min then every 5 minutes after that) until a cake tester comes out of the centre clean.
• Turn out the cake onto a wire rack to cool.
• Wait for the tin to cool down a enough to handle then butter and dust the top section with flour.
• Place the remaining batter into the top section of the giant cupcake mould.
• Bake at 170c for abut 45 min (check at 35 min then every 5 minutes after that) until a cake tester comes out of the centre clean.
• Turn out the cake onto a wire rack to cool.

To decorate the bottom of the giant cupcake:

I wanted the bottom of the cake to look like a pink spotty cupcake case. I used

Vanilla frosting,

White fondant icing,

Pink gel colour.

• I levelled the cake with a bread knife in preparation for placing the top of the cake on later. I then turned the cake upside down.
• I dusted the worksurface with icing sugar and coloured some white fondant icing with pink gel colour by kneading the colour through. (Keeping some fondat white to make the spots)
• Next I rolled out the pink fondant on a non stick mat until it was wide enough to cover the entire of the upside down base of the cake.
• I used my standard vanilla frosting to crumb coat the (upside-down) base of the cupcake then covered the cake with the pink fondant. I smoothed the fondant into the grooves of the base.
• I cut out some circles of white fondant and used a little water to attach them to the pink fondant.
• Finally I turned the cake right way up, placed it on a cake board and used some more vanilla frosting to attach the top of the cake.

To decorate the top of the giant cupcake:

To stop the cake being too sickly I decided to use white chocolate ganache and hand made sugar flowers to decorate the top section.

For the ganache:

400g white Belgian cooking chocolate

150ml double cream

• Melt the  white chocolate in a microwaveable bowl in 15 second bursts stirring in between. Once the chocolate has mostly melted stop heating it and continue to stir until all the lumps have melted.
• Stir in the double cream.
• Pipe the ganache onto the top of the cake in a spiral from bottom to top.
• Decorate the cake with sugar paste flowers – I made my own but you can buy them from most good craft stores nowadays.
• I added some long white candles left over from when I made my daughter’s birthday cake last year to finish the cake off.

When we cut into the cake the ripple looked really nice as you can see below 🙂