That's right guys and gals! It was time for an update to my original Valentine's Day cake, and this is what I came up with:
With oodles of white chocolate curls, striped side panels and a decorative centre, this cake is positively swimming in white chocolate, and reveals a hidden surprise inside to boot:
I wanted to really trump my previous Valentine's day cake, and thought that having a hidden design would really pack a punch that would take it to a show-stopper level. Hidden design cakes have been increasingly popular throughout the last few years, and so I decided to give it a try. I used this video as a guide. I used a basic Madeira cake recipe, which is sturdy, and easy to carve, and can be flavoured in many ways. The outer part was my usual go-to lemon drizzle recipe from Lulu Grimes, but scaled up slightly. Any normal home or shop-bought buttercream would be good in this recipe, but because I find that buttercream can be a bit too sugary and buttery, especially for a cake that was going to be covered in lots of white chocolate, I gave a try to this recipe that I saw from popular YouTube baker yoyomax. It was briliantly sticky for securing all the bits and pieces on, and really helped to balance out the sweetness of the chocolate. When working with chocolate, you must control your temper! Tempering chocolate sounds very weird and pointless (heating it up, letting it cool and then heating it up again) but this is where the magic of the chemistry in chocolate happens and it's vital to get your chocolate to set properly to get that smooth sheen and snap. Properly tempered chocolate also sets much quicker (we're talking minutes), making your work much faster! This recipe is already quite long, so I won't explain how to do it here, but there are many instructions available in good chocolate cook books or online, such as this clear guide to tempering, by Elizabeth LaBau on About.com. Tempering is really just the chemistry of rearranging the crystals inside the chocolate into a nice, neat, ordered pattern. As such, temperature is key, and I will recommend again my awesome laser thermometer, which makes this procedure a doddle, and if you buy it from the DIY/hardware departments, they are not expensive.There's nothing especially difficult here, but there are many steps to create all the separate parts, so it takes several hours of a couple of days to get this neatly finished. So if you have the time and the determination, read on!
Ingredients:
Hidden heart cake (used for a 13 cm round tin):
115 g (4 oz) unsalted butter, softened
115 g (4 oz) caster sugar
115 g (4 oz) self-raising flour
50 g (2 oz) plain flour
2 eggs (at room temperature)
Grated zest of one lemon
Lemon drizzle cake:
280 g (10 oz) unsalted butter
280 g (10 oz) caster sugar
3 lemons, zested and juiced
5 eggs
250 g (9 oz) self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
63 g (2.2 oz) ground almonds
icing sugar for creating drizzle
Buttercream:
You can use any buttercream of your choice, but I gave a try of Super Fluffy, Not-too-Sweet, Cooked Frosting from yoyomax.
120 ml (1/2 cup) of milk
2 tablespoons plain flour
1 tsp vanilla
120 g (1/2 cup) icing sugar
110 g (1/2 cup) softened, but not warm, unsalted butter
grated zest of one lemon and/or few tablespoons lemon curd for flavouring if desired
White chocolate decorations:
150 g (5 oz) white chocolate
150 g (5 oz) pink chocolate. I previously used Wilton Candy Melts, but lately I've had trouble with getting it to melt to a nice fluid consistency, so I have switched to the strawberry flavour of Callebaut, which I got from eBay
1 tbsp freeze-dried raspberry pieces (available from Waitrose and many online sellers)
To make the hidden heart cake
1. Preheat the oven to 160C/235F/Gas 3. Grease and line your cake tin. I used a 13 cm round tin because that was all I had available, but ideally it would be better to have the smaller tin the same shape as your outer tin in which you will bake it again later. But I'm a poor student, so buying a second, smaller heart-shaped tin wasn't an option!2. Cream the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl until light and fluffy and very pale - about five minutes with an electric mixer.
3. Sift the flours in a separate bowl.
4. Beat the eggs into the creamed mixture, one at a time, each time adding a few spoonfuls of flour to prevent the mixture from curdling.
5. Sift the remaining flour into the creamed mixture and fold in carefully with a spatula. Add any flavouring if using.
6. Spoon into the lined tin and bake for 45 min to 1 hour. When it's ready, it will be firm to the touch and the old skewer test is also a good indicator (it should come out clean when poked in the middle).
7. Leave the cake to cool and rest for at least 12 hours before cutting the cake
8. Once the cake is rested, follow the instructions given in Maria's video. Start off by cutting a hole in the middle, then cut a deep v shape all along the top. Turn it upside down and cut a peak along the middle of the ring. Effectively what you are doing is making a cross-section of a heart running all the way round in the ring.
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| The top and the bottom of the hidden heart ring |
To make the lemon drizzle cake
1. Heat the oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4. Butter and line the base of a heart-shaped cake tin.
2. Beat the butter and caster sugar in a large bowl using an electric hand whisk until pale and creamy. Add the lemon zest (reserving some for decoration) and mix well.
3. Whisk the eggs gradually into the butter mixture, beating well between each addition – don’t worry if it curdles.
4. Sift together the flour and baking powder and fold into the cake mixture using a large metal spoon or spatula. Add the ground almonds and three quarters of the lemon juice and fold until thoroughly combined. Spoon half the mixture into the prepared cake tin and put the heart ring into the middle. Put the remaining cake batter over the top of the ring. Don't worry if it isn't all fully covered, the batter will rise alongside it as it bakes. Bake for 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out without any raw mix on it.
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| My cake, before and after baking |
5. Put the cake tin on a wire rack to cool for 10 minutes. Meanwhile mix together the remaining lemon juice and zest and enough icing sugar to make a runny icing and then drizzle over the top of the cake while it is still warm. Cool in the tin for a further 30 minutes and then remove from the tin to cool completely.
Chocolate side stripe panels
1. To make the side panels, you will need a piece of acetate or stencil PVC plastic. I got mine from the Stencil Style Art shop on eBay, which I mentioned in my Ultimate Breaking Bad Cake post. Wash it thoroughly with warm soapy water first to make it safe for use with food. Then put it on your cool surface and put some of your tempered white chocolate on top.
2. Working quickly, spread the chocolate using a spreader with a serrated edge. I used this one, but it seems not to be available any more on Amazon. An alternative which I was recommended by the brilliant Rob Smart (former contestant on GBBO 2013) is a glue spreader! Again, it must be washed before use on food, but it worked really well at spreading the chocolate into even lines.
3. Cover the whole A4 sheet in this way. This should produce enough squares to put on your cake and plenty extra in case some break. Wait for the chocolate to set (if your chocolate is tempered properly, this should only take a few minutes). Keep testing an edge with your finger to see if it is ready or not.
4. In the meantime, make sure your pink chocolate is also tempered and cooled sufficiently so that they don't melt the white chocolate striped when it is placed on top. I previously tried to do this with pink candy melts, but they really, really just don't act like chocolate, so the two didn't mix well.
5. Spread the pink chocolate on top of your white stripes promptly with a palette knife making sure you get in between all the lines, but be careful not to melt or squash the original white chocolate stripes.
6. After few minutes or so, the pink chocolate will also begin to set, so at this point you can score the edges of your squares (or any other shape that you might want). I measured the height of my baked cake and it was 5 cm, so I decided to make 5 cm square pieces, which I marked out using a ruler next to the sheet, but it also helps if you have one of these pastry mats with measurements along the side.
It does look terribly messy in this last photo, but that's because I had to do this whilst taking photos too and didn't leave it the right amount of time to score the marks! Nevertheless, once you leave them to set for a minimum of 15 minutes in a cool place, and carefully peel them off the plastic sheet, you will find that the other side looks quite nice! Here are some of my leftover bits:
White chocolate heart
After I finished with the panels, I cleaned the acetate sheet and used it to make a heart centre piece for the cake
1. Draw a heart shape of an appropriate size and shape on a piece of paper and place it underneath your acetate.
2. Spoon some of your tempered white chocolate onto the acetate in the shape of your design and whilst it is still melted, sprinkle some pieces of freeze-dried raspberries or strawberries on top. Leave it to set for ten minutes. You can use any other decoration of your choice, like sprinkles, chocolate curls, lemon zest or anything else that you fancy! But it has to be done whilst the chocolate is melted, so that they set firmly.
3. Spoon some of the leftover pink chocolate into a small piping bag and cut off the end leaving a few mm size hole or place a small round piping tip inside the bag. Pipe any letters or decorations you wish onto the heart.
White Chocolate Curls
1. Meanwhile, spread the remainder of your white chocolate onto the marble slab and leave for at least ten minutes to set.
2. Take a very sharp knife, and keeping it at a very shallow angle (less than 45°) carve curls using a motion that moves the knife away from you. Some people also say peelers or cheese slicers work well for them, but I prefer to use a knife.
If the chocolate doesn't want to curl and just keeps flaking, you can try to give it a blast with a hair drier to softer it up, but this will not work with everything (I did try to curl the striped chocolate, but the candy melts refused to curl at all, so I guess it's not a real chocolate substitute! I used a few of the flakes to decorate the top of the cake though).
Cake assembly
Once you have all your chocolate decorations ready, you are ready to put them all together to make the cake look really spectacular! Start by placing on the side stripe panels. I started at the V point at the bottom of the heart.
Inevitably, some broke during the making process, but I had enough to get all the way around my cake with overlapping pieces so that no cake or buttercream showed through.
Once the side of the cake is finished, start to place the white chocolate curls over the top of the cake so that they radiate outwards from the centrepiece of the cake and slightly hang over to cover up the tops of the side panels.
For the "not-so-sweet" buttercream
Any regular buttercream would also be good in this recipe, but I chose this one to balance out the sweetness of the cake
1. Place 120 ml milk into a medium saucepan.
Add 2 tablespoons of all-purpose flour to the milk and whisk together. Cook
over medium high heat, stirring continuously, until it becomes a very thick
smooth paste. This can take 3-4 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool
completely.
2. Beat the cooled flour/milk mixture with 1
tsp of vanilla on high speed for 4 minutes. It will become a smooth paste
again.
3. In a separate bowl combine the 120 g icing sugar and 110 g softened unslated butter together with a electric mixer. Blend on high
for 4 minutes.
4. Combine the flour/milk, butter/sugar mixtures together with lemon zest and curd to taste (if using) and beat on high speed with an electric mixer for 3-4 minutes until super fluffy.
5. Cover the top and sides of the cake, then leave it in the fridge to chill. It sometimes helps if you put strips of greaseproof paper or spare baking paper underneath the edges of the cake so that if the application of the buttercream gets a bit messy, then at the end, you can simply just pull out the sheets from underneath the cake, meaning less cleaning! (see later photo)
4. Combine the flour/milk, butter/sugar mixtures together with lemon zest and curd to taste (if using) and beat on high speed with an electric mixer for 3-4 minutes until super fluffy.
5. Cover the top and sides of the cake, then leave it in the fridge to chill. It sometimes helps if you put strips of greaseproof paper or spare baking paper underneath the edges of the cake so that if the application of the buttercream gets a bit messy, then at the end, you can simply just pull out the sheets from underneath the cake, meaning less cleaning! (see later photo)
To make the chocolate decorations
Before starting temper both your chocolates (they say candy melts don't require
tempering, but I wasn't quite sure about this, so I just tempered it anyway!). If you're not sure how to do it, follow the instructions by Elizabeth LaBau on About.com. It helps if you have a marble slab to do chocolate work, but more or less any cool surface will do. For white chocolate, I use 38 - 40°C for the first step, then cool to about 28 - 29°C and then reheat to about 30 - 32°C
tempering, but I wasn't quite sure about this, so I just tempered it anyway!). If you're not sure how to do it, follow the instructions by Elizabeth LaBau on About.com. It helps if you have a marble slab to do chocolate work, but more or less any cool surface will do. For white chocolate, I use 38 - 40°C for the first step, then cool to about 28 - 29°C and then reheat to about 30 - 32°C
Chocolate side stripe panels
2. Working quickly, spread the chocolate using a spreader with a serrated edge. I used this one, but it seems not to be available any more on Amazon. An alternative which I was recommended by the brilliant Rob Smart (former contestant on GBBO 2013) is a glue spreader! Again, it must be washed before use on food, but it worked really well at spreading the chocolate into even lines.
3. Cover the whole A4 sheet in this way. This should produce enough squares to put on your cake and plenty extra in case some break. Wait for the chocolate to set (if your chocolate is tempered properly, this should only take a few minutes). Keep testing an edge with your finger to see if it is ready or not.
4. In the meantime, make sure your pink chocolate is also tempered and cooled sufficiently so that they don't melt the white chocolate striped when it is placed on top. I previously tried to do this with pink candy melts, but they really, really just don't act like chocolate, so the two didn't mix well.
5. Spread the pink chocolate on top of your white stripes promptly with a palette knife making sure you get in between all the lines, but be careful not to melt or squash the original white chocolate stripes.
6. After few minutes or so, the pink chocolate will also begin to set, so at this point you can score the edges of your squares (or any other shape that you might want). I measured the height of my baked cake and it was 5 cm, so I decided to make 5 cm square pieces, which I marked out using a ruler next to the sheet, but it also helps if you have one of these pastry mats with measurements along the side.
It does look terribly messy in this last photo, but that's because I had to do this whilst taking photos too and didn't leave it the right amount of time to score the marks! Nevertheless, once you leave them to set for a minimum of 15 minutes in a cool place, and carefully peel them off the plastic sheet, you will find that the other side looks quite nice! Here are some of my leftover bits:
White chocolate heart
After I finished with the panels, I cleaned the acetate sheet and used it to make a heart centre piece for the cake
1. Draw a heart shape of an appropriate size and shape on a piece of paper and place it underneath your acetate.
2. Spoon some of your tempered white chocolate onto the acetate in the shape of your design and whilst it is still melted, sprinkle some pieces of freeze-dried raspberries or strawberries on top. Leave it to set for ten minutes. You can use any other decoration of your choice, like sprinkles, chocolate curls, lemon zest or anything else that you fancy! But it has to be done whilst the chocolate is melted, so that they set firmly.
 |
| Sprinkle the decorations onto the heart whilst still melted |
White Chocolate Curls
1. Meanwhile, spread the remainder of your white chocolate onto the marble slab and leave for at least ten minutes to set.
2. Take a very sharp knife, and keeping it at a very shallow angle (less than 45°) carve curls using a motion that moves the knife away from you. Some people also say peelers or cheese slicers work well for them, but I prefer to use a knife.
 |
| Making chocolate curls |
Cake assembly
Once you have all your chocolate decorations ready, you are ready to put them all together to make the cake look really spectacular! Start by placing on the side stripe panels. I started at the V point at the bottom of the heart.
Inevitably, some broke during the making process, but I had enough to get all the way around my cake with overlapping pieces so that no cake or buttercream showed through.
 |
| Application of striped chocolate panels. The baking sheet catches any messy buttercream spills and can be simply slipped out from underneath the cake at the end |
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| Cross-section of a slice |
Overall, I'm quite pleased with the way the cake came out, but next time I'd like to have a more exact size tin for the inside hidden design ring. Making it was much easier than I thought, and now I've got the bug to try out another hidden design!
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