Freya Cake

I made a cake for my friend Freya's birthday this weekend and since she is bright and bubbly and loves a bit of sparkle, a pink sparkly cake was in order.  I give you...Freya Cake!

If only the sparkly bits showed up properly in the photo.


This was a tried and tested Nigella method but with a few adaptations to the ingredients of my own and I sort of made it up as I went.  I wanted a slightly chocolatey taste to this cake but not too full on as I find chocolate cake sometimes quite sickly and that gets in the way of me eating huge chunks of it! Inside there were pink swirls running through it but I have no photo as there was a multitude of cake and we left the party before this one was even cut.  One of our friends had made rainbow cake and it looked awesome.  There was also plate upon plate of fabulously decorated cupcakes, I have a lot of very talented friends when it comes to baking! 


Ingredients:
225g very soft unsalted butter
125g light muscovado sugar
100g caster sugar
4 large eggs
225g self raising flour
1 1/2 tbsp cocoa powder
Pink food dye (I use the colour paste but the liquid stuff would work too, you would just need more)


For the frosting:
150g soft unsalted butter
350g icing sugar
2 tbsp milk
Orange essence
Pink food dye
Sparkles and stars to decorate!


Preheat oven to 190 degrees C.
Put all of the cake ingredients except the cocoa and colouring in the food processor and blitz until smooth.
Spoon out half of the mixture into a separate bowl and add the cocoa to the mixture left in the processor and blitz again until combined and smooth.
To the mixture in the bowl add the food colouring and mix until evenly coloured.
In two lined 21cm sandwich tins add alternate blobs of the chocolate and pink mixture.  This will look a right mess but then using a knife or the edge of a spatula swirl the two mixtures into one another until you have a pink and brown marbled effect like so:

Clearly you can see I have great trouble getting the mixture into the tin neatly! 


Bake for about 25 minutes, they are ready when they start to come away from the tin and a knife comes out clean. Leave to cool completely.


For the icing, blitz the butter in the processor for a couple of seconds to get it smooth then start adding the icing sugar a large tablespoon at a time until all combined.  This may be fine as it is but mine was quite claggy so adding a bit of milk got it to the perfect consistency.  Add the food colouring and orange essence and you are ready to frost.  This made enough to sandwich the sponges together and cover the top.  If I had thought about it in advance then I would have added jam to the butter cream in the middle but it's not essential.  
Decorate according to how girly you want to be!


If you wanted a more chocolatey cake then you could add more cocoa but you would probably need to take away some flour to stop it getting too dry so you would need to play around with the quantities.  


As I made this up I decided I got to name it and 'slightly-chocolatey-and-pink-sponge-marble cake-with-slightly-orange-frosting' wasn't very catchy so it's called Freya cake, it's my gift to the world!