Birthday Bonanza

We're well into birthday season here in the Expatemma household.  It runs from late August through til the beginning of November - but October is the real bonanza month - I think there are eight this month.  Now of course, birthdays mean lots of things - but here, there's a lot of importance placed on cake.....  yup you guessed it, more baking fun!!

Well celebrating a 65th birthday this year, you do really need to pull out all the stops - and this included a surprise weekend away for the birthday boy who was lucky enough to share this milestone with his family all together in Deutschland.

Cake wise, I'd been inspired by tinnedtomatoes when I saw this fantastic After Eight cake on her blog - and it was yummy....  a moist, tower of a concoction with peppermint buttercream, chocolate buttercream - and topped off with after eights..... yummy!

You can find the recipe here it's very easy to do and you get a fantastically light and moist cake from the very runny batter you end up with - it does work so although it looks far too runny to be a cake keep with it!

I split the said batter into three tins and we went from this:

to this:

The buttercream is my usual 1:2 recipe - 250g butter well whipped on its own with 500g icing sugar - followed by whatever flavourings you fancy - in this case a few drops of peppermint essence in the white icing and a very generous shake or three of cocoa powder for the chocolate.

The resulting cake was a tower of lusciousness, very moist yet light and airy - and lots and lots of icing - just right to celebrate with some well chilled Sekt!

More cake to be constructed later in the week too as we are finally (only about 6 weeks after the event - well I suppose we can't be accused of binging bad luck on him by doing it early...) holding Son#1's birthday party - his requested 'sinking of the Titanic' might be a bit beyond me but no doubt something suitably nautical will be produced..... fingers crossed it meets with approval!  Watch this space....