I set myself a hard task in making a birthday cake for my partners 30th birthday. He is probably going to kill me for telling the world this, but, he’s a bit of a batman fan so I knew exactly where to start when coming up ideas for his birthday cake.
I had no idea where to start so the first I did was google ‘batman cakes’. Bearing in mind it was my partners 30th birthday, I wanted to make sure that the cake was more for an adult than for a child. I came across two cakes that I really liked and decided to combine the ideas to create my perfect cake.
Once I had decided what I wanted the outside of the cake to look like, I had to decide what I wanted the inside look like. Mr. T is a Nutella fan so I decided to do a chocolate sponge with a nutella frosting. I left myself no easy task by opting for three sponges sandwiched and coated by the frosting…the easy part!
Sponge Recipe: (www.taste.com.au)
- 125g butter, softened
- 3/4 cup caster sugar
- 2 eggs, lightly beaten
- 1 1/4 cups self-raising flour, sifted
- 1/4 cup cocoa powder, sifted
- 1/2 cup milk
- Preheat oven to 180°C/160°C fan-forced. Grease 3 20cm round cake pans. Line bases and sides with baking paper.
- Using an electric mixer, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating after each addition. Stir in flour, cocoa and milk until combined.
- I divided this recipe between three cake tins to bake until skewer inserted in centre comes out clean. Stand in pan for 5 minutes. Turn them onto a wire rack to cool completely.
Nutella Cream Cheese Frosting:
- 500g softened cream cheese
- 250g nutella
- 750g icing sugar
- 2tbspns cocoa powder
- With a beater, beat the cream cheese until smooth.
- Add the icing sugar 1 cup at a time and beat until combined.
- At this time, I took a little of the frosting out and left it aside to decorate the outside of the cake at the end.
- Add the cocoa powder and beat until combined.
- Using a spatula, gently fold in the Nutella. Do not over stir the frosting, you do not want over worked frosting!
As I was waiting for the cakes to cook, it was time to roll out my yellow icing to coat the cake. I used ready made icing from Coles which made the process simple.
I then rolled out the black icing. I had a Batman symbol printed as a template as I wanted to make sure it was symmetrical. The hardest part was probably the buildings as I didn’t have a template for this but I was really happy with how it turned out.
Assembly:
When I took the cakes out of the oven, two cakes were a little uneven so I had to cut these parts off (when cool) as I didn’t want a lopsided cake.
I smoothed a layer of Nutella on top of the first cake and repeated with each layer. I then used the last of the frosting to coat the outside of the cake.
I put the yellow icing over the cake carefully and trimmed the edges.
I used a small brush to apply water to one side of the black icing pieces to help it to stick to the yellow icing.
Once I completed this, I used the frosting from the earlier stage to tidy up the bottom of the cake. I mixed a few drops of black food colouring into the frosting and used a piping bag to pipe it along the bottom of the cake.
It was finished! It took about fours hours to make and assemble the cake and I was more than happy with the result!
Have fun making your cake!
Lifestyle by Lily 
1 Comment