White Choc Cake with White Choc Frosting

I was flipping through my newly bought copy of the April 2009 Good Food magazine when I came across this recipe for hazelnut frosted white chocolate cake. I was immediately intrigued, because I've been looking for a good and easy recipe for white chocolate cake for ages.

Since I already had all the ingredients for the cake (not the hazelnut frosting) on hand, I decided to make the cake :D I used a different recipe for white chocolate frosting instead of the hazelnut frosting. (If you want the recipe for hazelnut frosting, leave a comment and I'll post it!)


White Chocolate Cake (pg 124 of Good Food UK April 2009, also the cover recipe)

• 250g butter


• 140g white chocolate, broken to pieces


• 250ml milk


• 1 tsp vanilla extract


• 2 cups self raising flour


• 1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda


• 300g or 1 1/3 cups sugar


• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten

1. Heat oven to 160C. Grease and line a 23cm or 9" cake tin.


2. Place butter, chocolate, milk and vanill in a small saucepan, then heat gently, stirring, until melted.


3. Combine flour, bicarb and sugar in a large bowl, with a pinch of salt, then stir in melted ingredients and eggs until smooth.


4. Pour batter into tin, bake for an hour or until cake is golden and skewer comes out clean. (This is very dependent on your oven. My cake took about 1 hour 15 minutes to cook well.)


5. Cool in tin. Once cool, you can wrap the cake in clingfilm and foil and then frozen to up to one month.

I did change that last line a little - instead of cooling the cake in the tin, I left it to cool for 5 minutes, then took it out of the tin, wrapped it in clingfilm and cooled it on a wire rack.

Once it was cooled, I started making my frosting, using this recipe that I got from this website:


White Chocolate Frosting:

• 100g white chocolate


• 100g butter, softened


• 225g icing sugar, sifted


• 1 tbsp milk

Melt chocolate, then leave to cool slightly. Beat butter in another bowl till soft. Gradually beat in other ingredients.


Simple, isn't it?? :D It's really easy to make this cake. It barely requires any thinking at all!

Since I was lacking the chocolate, I had to use only 50g of chocolate for the frosting, but it didn't detract from the taste at all :D I did make a small mistake with the frosting - I'd used the chocolate when it was still too hot, so it melted the butter and made the frosting all wonky. I had to keep stirring the mixture for ages before it cooled down and turned into a far more useable state! Still, the frosting turned out pretty good, albeit a little difficult to use, and rather unattractive looking.

This amount of frosting just barely covered my cake, so I would suggest making more of it - maybe about 1.5 times the amount.

If you're going to make a double layered cake, simply double the recipe for the cake, and triple the recipe for the frosting. Well, I say triple the frosting recipe because I like alot of frosting!

Once the frosting has been cooled and set, you can finally cut into your treat and sample this white chocolate-y goodness!


The Verdict:
Ingredients: Much like the butter cake with buttercream frosting, this is very much a store-cupboard cake. Well, at least, it is to me! I usually keep a few bars of white and dark chocolate in my cupboard just in case I want to make double chocolate chunk cookies in the middle of the night.

Easiness: Like I said, you don't even have to think about it! Dump dry stuff in one bowl, dump all wet stuff except eggs in another bowl, melt wet stuff, pour that and eggs into dry stuff and mix, and there you have it! The frosting is a little more complicated than the plain buttercream frosting, but only because you have to melt chocolate, which is also really easy.

Texture: Very very good! It's soft and squidgy, incredibly moreish. Slightly crumbly, but then all of my cakes are always slightly crumbly. Why is that??? Anyway, it isn't dry at all. I'm not entirely sure it it's the recipe or because I did the take-out-of-tin-and-cool-it-wrapped-in-clingfilm thing. Actually, it's very moist - to the point where it's almost the sticks-in-your-teeth kind. Luckily, it isn't too bad. The crust is actually a little hard, but it's forgiveable, I guess.

Taste: Very good taste! It tastes creamy and milky, with that hint of white chocolatey richness. Despite the fact that I used less white chocolate in it, the frosting is very good! I think that the fact that there is less white chocolate means that the white chocolate taste doesn't overwhelm your mouth. (You know how too much white chocolate can get cloying sometimes ^^;) So really, it isn't too jelak! (Jelak = easy to get sick of)


I think I will be trying out this recipe again, just to see how it'll taste like if I make it double layered, or with more white chocolate in the frosting! :D