Unbirthday Bakery Cake

There is a craze sweeping across Australia. No, it's not barbecues. It's not a new diet. It's not even crunning. It is in fact a style of cake, which, if it hasn't appeared on your Instagram mini-feed yet, you're clearly not following the right people (or a large number of bakers from all over the world like the nerdy baker that I am hehe). The cake consists of pastel-coloured buttercream spread over a tall or multi-tiered cake, decorated with a mouthwatering dripping chocolate ganache running down the sides of the cake, embellished with an explosion of random decorations arranged in an artistic manner that can only be described as a "hot mess". Initially thought to have been kick-started into popularity by the very talented Katherine Sabbath, this style of cake has now been copied all over, and seems particularly popular amongst Australian bakeries who have specialised in this type of cake, such as the Unbirthday Bakery (after whom I named this cake, because that's where I first spotted them), Don't Tell Charles, Sugar High Desserts and many, many others. I figured may as well jump on the bandwagon and have a go at this easy, but impressive-looking cake.

As you will know by now, I'm not a big fan of buckets of buttercream and fondant, so for the sides of the cake, I stuck to my trusty old modelling chocolate, which gave a nice pastel shade and quick coverage with no faffing around with smoothing.
But for the inside, I wanted to spice things up and go the extra mile since it was for a friend's birthday, and I created a three-level chequerboard cake:

Ingredients:

Sponges (make THREE of these):

115 g (4 oz) unsalted butter, softened

115 g (4 oz) caster sugar

100 g (4 oz) self-raising flour

25 g (2 oz) ground almonds

2 eggs (at room temperature)

Food colouring to dye each cake a different colour for chequerboard effect)

Decorations:

2 egg whites
Double the weight of the egg whites with unrefined sugar
300 g buttercream
300 g modelling chocolate to cover the side of the cake
75 g milk chocolate
75 g dark chocolate
150 ml double cream
50 g melted dark chocolate
A selection of chocolates of your choice (I used mini-eggs, since it's close to Easter)
Modelling chocolate to make flowers

To make the decorations:

1. Make the decorations in advance. First make the meringue. Weigh your egg whites, and then measure double the weight of unrefined sugar. Spread out the sugar on a baking tray and heat up in a 200c oven for around ten minutes, until the edges start to go brown (heating up the sugar in this way helps it to dissolve in the egg whites). After you take the sugar out, turn the oven down to 80 degrees C.

2. In the mean time, start to whisk the egg whites to a soft/mid peak.

When the sugar is hot enough, add to the egg whites one tablespoon at a time, mixing thoroughly until the sugar is fully dissolved and the meringue comes to a stiff peak. You can test whether the meringue is ready by rubbing a small amount between your finger tips. If you can still feel some grains of sugar, then it needs to be whisked a little more. 

Once the meringue is ready, pipe kisses, nests or any other shapes you prefer. You can make stripes on the meringue by painting food colouring on the inside of the piping bag.

Place in the 80 degree oven for about 6 hours.

In the meantime, you can make some chocolate flowers from modelling chocolate or any other shape that you like. I also made come chocolate curls by spreading tempered melted chocolate onto a piece of acetate, and then taping it up in a cylinder.

Other designs that I've seen have also had almond brittle, macarons, chocolate bars, fresh fruit or real fresh flowers as decoration.

To make the sponges: 

1. Preheat the oven to 160C/235F/Gas 3. Grease and line a 20 cm cake tin. 

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. Add any food colouring here if using

3. Sift the flours and ground almonds together.

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 30 - 45 min until done. 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 6 hours before cutting the cake

8. Whilst the first cakes are cooling, repeat the process from step 1 two more times, colouring the sponge a different shade or colour

9. Use a cake slicer to make sure the tops of each cake are level. Then trim the edges of each cake so that each one is 18 cm wide. I then used pastry cutters of roughly 12 cm and 6 cm size in order to cut equal concentric circles from each sponge.

10. Decide on the pattern you'd like your chequerboard to be, and then start to construct the cake from the bottom up. Put a thin layer of buttercream between each circle, and a slightly thicker layer of buttercream between each layer

11. Once constructed, cover the sides of the cake with buttercream to form a crumb coat and then put in the fridge to chill for an hour or so.

Decorating the cake:

1. In the meantime, colour your modelling chocolate to the desired colour, and roll it out to cover the sides of the cake. Pop the cake in the fridge so that it's nice and cool - this is important as a cold cake will stop the ganache from dripping all the way down to the bottom of the cake

2. Make the ganache topping by heating up the double cream, and then pouring it over the chocolate in a bowl. Stir until the chocolate is melted

3. While the chocolate is still warm, pour over the top of the cake, and using a palette knife, carefully spread towards the edges, to allow some of the chocolate to drip down the sides of the cake

4. Once set, then add any decorations in the desired arrangement! Easy as pie! (or cake in this instance). Literally, the messier the cake looks, the better the effect

5. Prepare for everyone to be wowed when you cut the cake!