Hidden Red Nose Cake for Comic Relief

With Red Nose Day coming up this cake will make a fabulous show stopping centre piece for your bake sale.

Its two simple basic recipes, you will need a cake pop mould for the ‘noses’ and some good quality colouring paste, but the recipe is a simple all in one sponge. The chocolate cake is made based on my absolutely favourite BBC good food recipe, but has a chocolate ganache filling. It does use a lot of maltesers – a bit like my christmas pud cake – but the overall effect is well worth it!

Recipe

Noses

• 50g caster sugar
• 50g softened butter
• 1 egg
• 50g SR Flour
• 1/4tsp red food colouring paste ( I use Sugarflair red extra)

Bake your noses first as they should be cool when added to the chocolate cake batter.

Preheat the oven to 160C (fan) and brush the silicon mould with some melted butter.

Put all the ingredients into a bowl and combine with a spatula, it saves the mixture flying everywhere when you use the electric mixer!

Beat until throughly combined with an electric mixer (or beat with a wooden spoon for a good work out). Add the colouring and beat to get a really bright red colour.

Fill the solid half moulds to half way with the batter – I used a piping bag to make it less messy.

Put the lid on and bake for 15-20 mins, the moulds have a little steam hole on the lid section so you can test when they are baked by poking a cocktail stick through the hole.

Remove from the mould and leave to cool while you make the chocolate mix.

Chocolate Layers

• 100g Butter
• 50g plain chocolate
• 175g plain flour
• 200g caster sugar
• 25g cocoa powder
• 1/2tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 egg
• 100ml buttermilk
• 75ml boiling water

Grease and line the base of 3 x 6inch round cake tins. Preheat the oven to 160C (fan)

Prepare all ingredients into separate bowls. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a microwave safe bowl for 1 minute on full power. Place the dry ingredients, flour, sugar, cocoa powder and bicarb in a stand mixer bowl and mix slowly with the beater attachment. Whisk the egg and buttermilk together in a jug and boil the kettle.

Add the melted chocolate and buttermilk to the dry ingredients and combine on a slow speed. Measure 75ml boiling water into the jug then add slowly to the mixture, scrape round once to make sure you have all the ingredients incorporated and give it a final gentle whizz!

Using a large serving spoon put one spoon of mix into each tin and spread across the bottom, share the cooled noses between the tins and cover with the rest of the cake batter keeping it as even as possible between the tins. Using a spatula make sure the balls are covered and the mixture is evenly spread all over the tin. give each tin a light rap on the worktop to remove any big air bubbles and bake for 35/40 minutes, until a cocktail stick comes out clean, make sure you test just the chocolate cake not the noses!

When baked leave to cool for 5 minutes in the tin then remove and cool inverted on a cooling tray.

Whilst the cakes are baking you need to make the ganache to give it time to set enough to use.

Ganache

• 200ml double cream
• 400g milk chocolate

Place the cream and chopped chocolate into a plastic microwave safe bowl.

Heat for 1 minute at half power. Remove and swirl in the bowl. Repeat the process until the chocolate starts to melt and colour the cream. Use a silicon spatula and stir gently, heating for 30 second bursts, stirring between,  until no lumps remain.

Place in the fridge and stir every half hour whilst the cake bakes and cools.

Constructing the cake

480g Maltesers – Sainsburys currently have small Maltesers boxes on special offer and are also donating to Comic Relief

50g Red candy melts or white chocolate and red colouring.

You need to colour 6 Maltesers red to make the nose, I used white chocolate coloured with red paste but needed to add a little oil to make the chocolate runny enough so all a bit of  a faff, you can buy red Candy melts instead, just melt the chocolate and dunk the Maltesers in leave to harden on a sheet of greasproof paper and cut away and excess chocolate.

To layer up the cake cover the sides of the cake with the noses sticking out with ganache to make a smooth surface and sandwich the layers together. Use the smooth cake sides as the base and top of the cake.

Pop in the fridge to harden the ganache for 1/2 hr (or 10mins in the freezer if you have room)

Cover the outside of the cake in ganache, it doesn’t need to be perfect as its being covered in the Maletsers. Decorate by completely covering in the Maltesers, making a circle with the 6 red ones on the edge to make your “Red Nose”.

When you cut the cake there will be a fab surprise inside – this will make a great bake sae centre piece for Red Nose day fundraising events