I made this birthday cake for a friend's 50th birthday celebration. It's a 3 tier Baileys and Coffee Sponge Cake. Finished off with Bailey's swiss meringue buttercream and topped with lots of '70s chocolates.
Coffee and Baileys Celebration Cake
Ingredients:
For Sponge
340g softened unsalted butter
340g caster sugar
340g self-raising flour, sifted
6 large eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp baking powder
60ml (1/4 cup) Baileys Irish Cream
For Coffee Syrup
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 tbsp strong instant coffee
Swiss Meringue Buttercream
3 large egg whites
225g caster sugar
300g unsalted butter (at room temperature e.g. 21ºC and cut into small cubes)
2 tbsps Baileys (option to add more for stronger flavour)
Chocolate Ganache
100g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids) e.g. Lindt
100g double cream
(option to sub some cream for Baileys if you want to)
Decorations
Curly Wurly
Flake
Caramac
Rolos and Buttons or whatever other chocolates you would like
Preheat oven to 170ºC for fan oven. You will need 3 x 20cm sandwich tins, greased with butter and lined with baking paper.
Making The Coffee Syrup (can be made in advance)
Dissolve the water and sugar in a small saucepan and heat until simmering. Add the coffee granules and stir until dissolved.
Cool.
Making The Sponge (can be made day before, wrapped and kept in fridge)
Using a hand whisk or table top mixer, beat the butter and sugar together in a large bowl until light and fluffy.
Gradually whisk in the eggs a little at a time (otherwise they will curdle), and then add the vanilla essence. If it looks as though it's starting to curdle, add a little of the flour.
Fold in the sifted flour and baking powder (I like to fold gently using a metal spoon to give it plenty of air) until it's all combined.
Fold in the Baileys cream until incorporated.
Spoon into the three tins and level the top of the mixture.
Bake for approximately 25-30 minutes until golden brown. You can test whether sponge is cooked by pressing gently on the top of the cake. If it springs back, it's ready. It should also be shrinking away from the edge of the tin.
Remove from the oven onto a rack and leave in their tins for 10 minutes before turning out to cool completely.
Making the Buttercream
This is the tricky bit. You will need a liquid thermometer.
Put the egg whites and sugar into a heatproof bowl over a small pan of simmering water (not boiling and make sure the bowl does not touch the water). Whisk with a hand whisk until the temperature of the mixture reaches 60ºC. If you don't have a thermometer, you can take a chance and just stop whisking after 4 minutes or so.
Now transfer the mixture into a different bowl or using your worktop mixer (using a different bowl helps to reduce the temperature), and whisk on a medium/high speed until the temperature cools back down to room temperature. At this point you should have a firm meringue with stiff folds.
Gradually add the butter a tablespoon at a time and keep whisking until incorporated and you have added all of the butter. It should look silky, light and fluffy without any lumps of butter.
* At this stage, my buttercream curdled so it looked more like cottage cheese! A good tip if this happens is to take 2-3 tablespoons of the mixture and heat it in a microwave until melted. Add this back into your bowl and whisk together. It should bring your mixture back to life and look how it should. This worked really well for me.
Assembling the cake
Use a cake board slightly bigger than the size of your cake or you could just put it on a plate.
Place one sponge on your board or plate and drizzle over a few tablespoons of your coffee syrup. It's up to you how much you want to add, depends on how much you like coffee! I only added the coffee syrup to my middle layer cake, but you can choose to add it to the bottom and top, leaving the middle plain.
Once you've added the coffee, add a few tablespoons of the buttercream to the top of each cake (NOT THE TOP LAYER), saving the other half for the sides and also for decorations. The top layer will have a ganache topping.
Put a thin layer of buttercream around the sides of the cakes. This is called a 'crumb' layer and helps to set the buttercream. Once you have done this, pop the cake in the fridge for 30 minutes or so.
Take your cake out of the fridge and add the final layer of buttercream to the sides of the cake (save some buttercream for piping decorations). I used a dough scraper to spread the buttercream and get a level layer. Probably not technically the correct equipment to use, but it worked for me.
If you wanted to create a 'naked' cake with just a thin layer of buttercream on the edges - you can just stop after the first layer and use the excess buttercream for decorations or add more to sandwich the layers together.
Making the ganache
Another tricky thing to make.
The secret here is to chop your chocolate very small so that it melts evenly with the warm cream. Also not to boil the cream. Make sure you use good quality chocolate.
There are various ways to make ganache and the method I used was to heat the cream in a saucepan until it's just starting to simmer (not boil), and then pour it over the chopped chocolate in a bowl. Leave for 5 minutes and then stir. The problem was that my chocolate pieces were too big and didn't melt, so I ended up heating it even more - then it split 😬.
Another batch was made, but it wasn't runny enough. I have amended the recipe slightly to allow for this and I think next time, I would heat the cream together with the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a small pan of simmering water. I have used this method once before and didn't have any problems. I don't know why I didn't do it this time. I have read another hack where if your ganache isn't dripping consistency e.g. too thick, you can add a tablespoon of warm water to thin it down. Or you can do what I did - cheat and rush to Waitrose to buy a tube of their drip icing!
Decorating your cake
When your ganache is the right consistency, spoon some ganache near the edge of the cake and let it drip down. Try and aim for different lengths of drip.
Once the drips are done, put the remaining ganache on top of the cake.
Leave it to set at room temperature for 15 minutes.
Now the fun bit - assemble your decorations, banners and candles and think about how you might want to decorate your cake. It's a good idea to know what you want to do in advance.
With my cake, I used a piping bag and nozzle to pipe some buttercream swirls at the back of the cake which I used to mount the chocolate bars e.g. flake, curly wurly, and a miniature bottle of whiskey. Make sure these are pushed in well so they don't fall over when the cake is moved. Feel free to add buttercream swirls to the rest of the cake and add more decorations at the front.
To be honest there is no wrong or right here - you can be as creative as you want to be.
Don't forget to add your candles!
When you are ready to slice the cake, take off all the decorations on top and start at the nearest edge and cut a straight slice (not traditional wedge shapes). Then cut each slice into 3/4/5 pieces as you go further into the cake.
Enjoy!
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