16/9/12 - A cake with a name

A while ago my friends had a baby, and I made them a quilt as a present. Well now the baby is a bit bigger (she's still very small though!), they were having a baby-welcoming party (like a baby shower, but after the birth) Obviously they've already had their present, but I was asked to make a tasty cake so I made a cake with the baby's name on it. It's a chocolate cake similar to the birthday cake I made in August, but with raspberry jam instead of cherry for the sandwich-joining.
For some reason the cake rose very unevenly in the oven but i managed to fill in the dips with jam and chocolate icing. The small lumpy bits on the icing are where I didn't quite melt the chocolate in the ganache because my cream wasn't hot enough. Ah well.

The flowers are chocolate floodwork, similar to the floodwork flowers I made here but made out of melted white and milk chocolate instead of runny icing. The white chocolate for the outlining went a bit lumpy so some of the flowers were not very good - these are the best ones! The milk chocolate melted much better so filling the flowers was easier than the outlines. I kept the flowers in the fridge until I was ready to attach them to the cake, so they wouldn't melt.
The name is iced directly onto the cake, I practised a couple of times on greasproof paper to get the letters the right size and I made small marks in the icing with a skewer to keep the writing even (the marks were covered up by the writing)

Chocolate raspberry torte - 28/4/11

Another chocolate cake, baked for a friend's birthday. This is another recipe from Good Food magazine (here), though I used less of the raspberry filling than they suggested.
The main problem with this cake is that it wants two cakes baked in 9inch tins, and I only have one tin. I simply baked the cakes one at a time, but trying to line a hot tin with baking paper led to a slightly odd shaped cake! Fortunately these things are easily covered up with icing. Perhaps next time I should just cook it as one cake, and slice in half afterwards, though this would make a different texture as the cake is supposed to be still gooey on the inside after baking.