Chocolate Curls Birthday Cake
This cake was made for a friend of mine for her 30th birthday celebration.
It is a chocolate sponge with rich chocolate ganache filling and covering. Ganache is lovely to work with, it spreads beautifully and has a lovely velvety texture.
It has to be spread pretty quickly as the chocolate content makes it harden quite fast.
Once covered I made the chocolate curls around the top of the cake. I used a product called marvel ice which is a fondant type covering with a percentage of cocoa solids. It can be rolled out just as fondant can and handles very well.
I rolled out sections of marvel ice and then folded them in a concertina fashion to create thick curls. I then wanted curls standing up. I made these curls again with marvel ice.
These curls were thinner and coloured with edible gold lustre dust which was brushed onto the sections before applying them to the cake. The curls were supported with pieces of foam until they had hardened.
I made some roses to sit around the side of the cake. These were made the same way as in the Roses and Ribbon birthday cake and dusted with edible gold lustre dust.
I attached the roses using a little melted chocolate brushed onto the side of the cake. I added a few purple flowers around the cake as a finishing touch.
The huge amount of chocolate in this cake was very much appreciated. The birthday girl did struggle a bit with the large chocolate curls once the rest of the cake had been polished off but her nephews helped her out.
Odette
What the photos don’t show is just how delicious this cake was - somehow Amanda managed to make every element chocolatey without it being heavy or sickly - we devoured the entire cake over a weekend and it certainly helped to sweeten the blow of reaching the dreaded big three-oh!