A Weekend of Baking...Chocolate and Peanut Butter Birthday Cake

For my boyfriend's birthday, I gave him a choice of birthday cake, and he chose a peanut butter and chocolate cake. The recipe can be found here if you fancy giving it a go! The Little Loaf blog is fantastic, full of really gorgeous recipes that you can't wait to try and some brilliant links to other excellent foodie sites.

http://www.thelittleloaf.com/2012/10/12/chocolatepeanutbuttercake/

I was a little dubious as I read through the recipe  to start with as it contains no butter or other fats, just vegetable oil, which will obviously result in a very gooey chocolate cake, but I was a little worried about the taste. However, once you get the icing made, you'll forget all about that. 

The warning about the batter being quite liquid is also very well founded. I would describe it almost like pouring hot chocolate into the tins! (Tip: make sure the tins are well lined and you might want to put a try down on the bottom of the oven just in case they leak) 

The cake was lovely and thick and chocolatey and resulted in two of the flattest cakes I have ever made! That saved a bit of time when it came to assembling eveything. Do, however, be prepared for them to sink slightly, so I wold recommend leaving them overnight to cool completely and settle.

The icing (or frosting!) calls for icing sugar, double cream, butter and peanut butter all mixed together and spread over the cake. I whisked up the cream and a little icing sugar and made the butter, peanut butter and icing sugar mixture, and then decided to leave out the cream. I thought the combination of the three ingredients was perfectly tasty on its own, and I thought adding the cream would just be too much, so I decided to leave it out. I also made a slight alteration to the type of peanut butter. The recipe called for smooth but I decided to use chunky to give a bit of bit and crunch to a smooth cake. I think it worked really well so feel free to experiment if you're a lover of the crunchy stuff rather than the smooth one.

Decorate with Reece's Peanut butter cups and you are good to go with a peanut butter lovers dream!