Malted Chocolate Cake

As soon as I saw this cake over at The More Than Occasional Baker, replete with my guilty pleasure, Maltesers, it was only a matter of time before I was going to bake it. Luckily, my birthday provided the perfect excuse. After all the birthday festivities, ahem, back in July, it was time to go back to work - this means taking in birthday cake. If ever we get boxes of chocolates at work it is usually the Maltesers that disappear first. I thus reasoned, a Malteser cake would be a popular one for my work colleagues. As Ros didn't actually have the recipe on her site, I googled it and found it over at BitterSweetSpicy. The recipe comes from Annie Rigg's book Make, Bake & Celebrate - I obviously have a serious gap in my baking book collection!

Having just read Alida's post about using vinegar as well as eggs and baking powder, I thought I'd give this a try rather than using buttermilk which I didn't have. Because I made a mistake in the amount of sugar I used to begin with, I upped all of the quantities slightly as well as making a few other adjustments.

This is how I did it:

• Creamed 175g unsalted butter with 150g sugar (half vanilla sugar, half dark brown) until very light and fluffy.
• Added a pinch of rock salt and creamed some more.
• Beat in 3 large duck eggs one by one.
• Sifted in 275g self-raising flour (half wholemeal, half white), 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda and 2 heaped tbsp of Horlicks.
• Stirred in 100ml water mixed with 80ml of milk and 1 tbsp cider vinegar until just combined.
• Divided mixture between two 21 cm cake moulds and baked at 180C for 30 minutes.

• Poured 200ml double cream into a bowl over warm water and whisked in 50g of Horlicks. 
• Added 250g 37% milk chocolate (G&B) and left to melt.
• Removed from heat and stirred in 1 tbsp golden syrup and 75g unsalted butter.
• Left to cool and turn thick enough to ice.
• Slathered the mixture all one cake thickly and placed the other one on top.
• Covered the other cake and sides with the rest.
• Placed maltesers around the edge.

What I realised as soon as I'd put the cakes together and it was all too late, was that I had forgotten to crush some maltesers and put them in between the layers. Well what a shame, I was really looking forward to that bit. However, this proved to be the most popular cake yet with my work colleagues and I have to say I could very easily have demolished a goodly proportion of it myself if I'd had the chance. I had to make do with a modest slice though, which means only one thing - I will have to make this again.

I am submitting this to Jac's Bookmarked Recipes over at Tinned Tomatoes.