List: Chocolate, Butter, Chocolate
“What cake do you want for your birthday cake,” I asked my daughter. “Chocolate,” she said without hesitation. Well, that’s easy. We have the best, most impossible to stuff up chocolate cake recipe in this family. It has been passed from sister to sister and gets hauled out at every occasion. But wait, I thought, isn’t this a good opportunity to do a hard bake. I tentatively pulled open “The Great British Bake off, Big Book of Baking” as I ate a pastel de nata from my favourite Portuguese bakery http://Www.nata.co.nz and perused through the cakes. 
(most of which scare me! :/) And there in all its glory was this Classic Chocolate Fudge Sandwich Cake, together with a huge modeled chocolate flower as a centre piece. Easy peazy. This is it. It’s do or die.
So I decided to give myself the morning to do it. I made the sponges, two, separately as I only had one cake tin the right size. They were full of chocolate (200g of dark chocolate) so the sponge came out like a fudge brownie. I left them to cool on the bench.
I cut the sponges in half with a big serrated knife, to make four. 
Then I made the chocolate fudge filling (another 150g dark chocolate!) and the vanilla buttercream filling (which had 250g butter in it!) 
Hope you’re’ not on a diet. My daughter had suggested an Oreo cake so I decided to crumb some biscuits onto a vanilla buttercream layer and onto the sides of the cake for some artistic flare, not that the cake needed it. 
I assembled the four layers full of buttercream and chocolate fudge. The cake was huge. 
I was a bit worried about it being too sweet. Ya think!
Nevertheless, I plastered the top with fudge icing and the sides with Oreos and set to making the floral arrangement on top. That was fun. Who knew one could add liquid glucose to melted chocolate and turn it into a play dough like consistency that could be molded into fantastic shapes.
So I made the flower, and voila.
It was sweet and over the top but delightful in small doses with whipped cream and the perfect birthday cake for someone with a sweet tooth who loves brownies. 🙂
While shopping for my daughter’s birthday present, I was approached by a charity. 
Medecins Sans Frontieres informed me about their work with starving children and how we can help with just 70c/day. I thought what a great gift for my daughter, who has a big social conscience, so I knew she would appreciate it. So I signed up. Great charity BTW. http://www.msf.org/
My daughter is one of the school ball organisers and is promoting the idea of giving up an expensive aspect of ball prep to give the proceeds to a Give a Little page they have set up for the Auckland City Mission which supports the homeless. Go her.
