My poor husband was away on business for 2 weeks over his birthday. I’m not sure who had it worse, him alone on his birthday, or me alone with the waking-in-the-night 6 year old! Anyway, I made him a cake on return to make up for it. It was quite quick and easy. I made Annabel Langbein’s Ultimate Chocolate Cake recipe for this and it’s AWESOME. It makes 2 cakes if you use a 20cm or smaller cake tin. I halved the ganache ingredients and we still have some left over. Trick with using ganache as a filling, is that you pop it in the fridge and give it the odd stir every now and then for a couple of hours while it sets a bit. Otherwise it seeps in to the cake and runs everywhere.
I got this idea from Coco Cake Land, but changed it up a bit. I used a “grass” nozzle for doing the green grass – the trick here is that you have to make sure the butter cream is the right consistency or it all turns to sludge. I used Milo for dirt around the carrots. The carrots are made of fondant, along with the name plaque and flowers. The bunting is just attached to wooden skewers with bakers twine. The bunting was a free printable from Yellow Bliss Road.
The cake was much enjoyed by all!
Hint – make the carrots and plaque a few days in advance and put a cool place (not the fridge) to dry out hard before needing to use – otherwise they will turn to mush.