Magic Mushroom Cake
Mushrooms are magical in more than one way. This cake, for starters.
Author: The Chef
Cuisine: American
Recipe type: Cake
Ingredients
Cake
- 350g all-purpose flour
- 450g caster sugar
- 100g cocoa powder
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1 tsp salt
- 350g unsalted butter, softened
- 4 large eggs, at room temperature
- 350ml milk
- 300g chopped mint slice cookies
Frosting
- 2 batches chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream frosting
Magic mushrooms
- 1 batch American buttercream frosting
- 1 tbsp cocoa powder
- 5 drops red food gel
Grass Frosting
- 1 batch American buttercream frosting
- Light green Frosting: 4 drops green food gel
- Green frosting: 4 drops green food gel + 2 drops blue food gel
- Dark green frosting: 4 drops green food gel + 2 drops blue food gel + 3 drops purple food gel
Flowers
- ¼ batch American buttercream frosting
- 2 drops blue food gel
- 2 drops pink food gel
- 2 drops yellow food gel
- 2 drops orange food gel
Chocolate Bark
- 500g dark chocolate (melted)
- 300g white chocolate + 100g dark chocolate (melted together)
Instructions
Magic mushrooms
- To make magic mushrooms set aside 2 tbsp of white frosting in a small bowl. Add cocoa powder to the rest of the frosting and mix until well combined. Split the frosting in half and add the red food gel into the frosting. Mix until evenly coloured.
- Fit the end of a piping bag with a large round tip and pipe long upright stalks of light cocoa frosting onto a baking tray lined with baking paper. Chill
- Fit the end of another piping bag with a large round tip and pipe low, wide bulbs of red frosting. Add little blobs of white frosting to make the little white spot details. Chill the stalks and mushroom heads for about 40 min. Get them really chilled.
- Once the stalks are chilled use a very sharp knife to cut off the very top, creating a nice flat surface. Add a little dab of frosting on top of the stalk and stick the mushroom head on top. Keep chilled until ready to use.
Chocolate Bark
- Add a long piece of baking paper on a flat work surface. Drizzle the melted dark chocolate on top and use a large offset spatula to spread out the chocolate. Give it time to completely set. Use a fork to add some grooves in the set chocolate before you add some random light chocolate on top. Use the back of a tablespoon to spread it around. Let that second layer set completely before you use a sharp knife dipped in boiling water to cut different shaped rectangles of the bark. Kind of like random sized pieces of wood flooring.
Cake
- Please note: this chocolate cake recipe makes 1 batch. You’ll need two batches of chocolate cake to make this 6 layered cake. All other ingredients in the recipe are measured up to make the full 6 layer cake.
- Preheat a fan-forced oven to 140C (280F) or 160C (320F) for a conventional oven. Spray three 8” cake tins with oil spray and line the bottom with baking paper.
- Add the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, bicarb soda and salt to a large mixing bowl and mix together using a hand mixer to combine.
- Next add the softened butter and mix on low speed until mixture reaches a crumbly sand like texture.
- Add the eggs and milk and mix on low speed until no dry ingredients are showing. Scrape down the bowl and mix for another 20 seconds.
- Fill three 8” cake tins with batter. I find using an ice cream scooper to help me do this makes it easy to distribute the batter evenly so that everything bakes at the same time.
- Bake for 50-60 min or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. If the pick comes out with wet batter, bake for a further 10 min at a time until baked fully. Allow the tins to cool for 2 min and then carefully flip the cake tins over on to a cooling rack to cool completely before using. Chilling your cakes overnight before decorating means they’ll be easier to trim and decorate. So I bake my cakes the day before I trim them.
- To trim your chilled cake use a cake leveller or large serrated knife to carefully trim the first layer of cake by trimming it in half. Then trim the crust off the second layer so that you end up with two layers from each baked cake. When trimming make sure you aim to get both layers of cake the same height. Keep that in mind when trimming the first layer so the next layer will still be the same height as the first when trimming the crust off. Once you’re done trimming your three baked cakes you should end up with 6 layers of cake altogether.
- To prepare crumb coat, add a dab of chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream frosting onto an 10” cake board or serving plate. Add the first layer of cake. Pipe a ring of frosting around the first layer and fill the centre of the cake with more frosting. Use a small offset spatula to spread around a little before adding some chopped mint slice cookies. Add the second layer of cake and repeat with the remaining layers. Add more frosting around and top of the cake. Use a your small spatula to smoothen out the top and bottom of the cake before using a cake scraper (otherwise known as a bench scraper) to smoothen out the frosting. Get it as neat as you can. This should just be a neat thin layer of frosting which is aimed at trapping any cake crumbs so that random bits of cake crumbs don’t show up on the outside of the cake. Chill for 2 hours or overnight.
- Add a fresh layer of frosting using a small offset spatula. Use a cake scraper to smoothen out the frosting around the sides. Then smoothen out the top using the cake scraper.
- Stick the chocolate bark all around the cake.
Grass Frosting
- Split the frosting up into 3 bowls. Use the colour formulations to colour the three different shades of frosting.
- Fit the end of a piping bag with a grass tip. Line half of the inside of your bag with the dark green frosting. Line the other half with the green frosting. Fill the centre with the light green frosting
- Pipe grass on top of the cake and around the bottom.
Flowers
- Split the frosting up into 5 bowls. Use the colour formulations to colour the 5 different shades of frosting. Fit the end of four separate piping bags with very small round tips. For the pink flowers fit the end of a piping bag with a small star tip. Pipe random mini blobs of each colour in the grass.
- Add the buttercream mushrooms on top to finish.
Watch the recipe video here:
Mushrooms are magical in more than one way. ?✨Taste for Yourself: https://taste.md/2LSsqfl?: The Scran Line
Posted by Tastemade on Wednesday, August 1, 2018
