Raspberry & White Chocolate Easter Cake

As much as I love baking, I'm the most unadventurous person in the world.

I don't experiment. At all. Yes, I'll try new recipes and attempt to challenge myself, but when it comes to even slightly straying from the instructions I panic and completely refuse. Technical Thursdays meant I tried recipes for things I'd never heard of and could barely pronounce, but I followed the instructions to the letter. I have lots of ideas for recipes but never have the courage to try them out, but for some reason I'm feeling vaguely brave at the moment, so decided to transform an annotated doodle of a cake on a post-it note into reality.

For full disclaimer: this is a baby step and not nearly as impressive as it sounds! I worked out exactly how I wanted the cake to look, then trawled through the BBC Good Food website to find various recipes that I could mix together to make it happen.

The Raspberry & White Chocolate Easter Cake was born, combining a duck egg sponge with tart raspberry jam, a white chocolate buttercream and enough Mini Eggs to potentially single-handedly keep Cadbury's in business this year. Boom.

Some of the best things about living in the middle of nowhere in the countryside are:
(a) having neighbours who know your name
(b) having neighbours that kindly (and randomly) give you boxes of duck eggs.

There are only so many ways to creatively use eggs that my parents can endure before it all gets a bit much, so I volunteered to take the duck eggs off their hands and use them in a cake. They make the sponge extremely light and fluffy and when they're as free-range as this they give it a really bright yellow colour. If you don't want to use 5 duck eggs then just replace them with 250g of beaten hen's eggs.

The original recipes for the sponge and buttercream can be found by following the links, but they're combined below into this Easter cake with my notes.

Ingredients:

For the sponge:
250g butter, melted, plus extra for greasing
5 duck eggs
250g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
250g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder

(Is it just me, or do duck eggs look like mini velociraptor eggs?!)

For the buttercream:
200g white chocolate
275g softened butter
275g icing sugar

To assemble:
1 jar raspberry jam
4 packs of Mini Eggs (it's best to have 5 packs if you need certain colours for a pattern, but you'll have roughly a bag of unused colours left over)
3 packs of white chocolate Cadbury's Fingers

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Grease and line 2 x 20cm cake tins with baking parchment.

Crack the duck eggs into a large mixing bowl or free-standing electric mixer with the whisk attachment. Add the sugar and whisk for roughly 5 minutes until pale and fluffy.

Keep whisking as you add the melted butter, a little at a time.

Make sure it's thoroughly mixed between each addition of butter as you don't want little pesky pockets of butter in the cake batter.

Then whisk in the vanilla extract.

Fold in the flour and baking powder with a large metal spoon until you can’t see any pockets of flour.

Divide the mixture between the two prepared tins and bake for 35 minutes or until bouncy to the touch and a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.

Leave the cakes to cool in the tin and then turn out onto a wire rack.

While the cakes are cooling, make the buttercream. Melt the white chocolate in a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water.

Beat together the butter and icing sugar.

Then beat in the white chocolate until the buttercream is smooth.

Leave to one side until needed. If the sponges are still too warm to handle, leave the buttercream in the fridge until ready.

When the cakes are cool carefully level the tops with a sharp knife if necessary, and cut each one in half so you have four layers.

Begin to assemble the cake. Place a small blob of buttercream on a plate / cake stand and carefully press the first layer of cake onto it.

Cover in a thin layer of raspberry jam (roughly 2 tablespoons), making sure to leave 1-2cm around the edge to avoid it squidging out over the sides.

Build up the next three layers in the same manner, leaving the top of the cake bare.

Cover the sides and the top of the cake in a thin layer of buttercream - this is the crumb layer.

Then build up an even, thicker layer of buttercream on top. It needs to be thick enough to hold the decoration but not too thick that it's an overwhelmingly sickly addition. Also, it doesn't need to be neat if you're covering the whole thing with decorations, but smooth it out if you decide to leave the outside blank.

I've written 'layer' too many times, but if you say it in Mary Berry's voice then it's not so bad...

Once the buttercream is complete, decorate. Stick the chocolate fingers round the outside - a 20cm cake takes 2 and a half packs. Top the cake with the Mini Eggs, and serve.

Enjoy!

To say it looks exactly as I pictured in my head would be a bit of an understatement - clearly I should throw caution to the wind and experiment more often!

The pastels of the Mini Eggs give the cake an extremely Easter-y feel, but if you'd prefer a bolder look then Smarties Mini Eggs might be a better fit. Either way, the beauty is in the decoration, so go wild!

As I said at the beginning, the duck eggs ensured that the sponge was ludicrously light and fluffy, and I'm no expert but I'd imagine that the whisking at the start of the recipe made sure that as much air as possible was incorporated into the mixture. It really works - the sponge was suitably moist and a resounding success!

I'm personally a big fan of the raspberry/white chocolate combo (so not trying this was horrendous!) but reports from friends and family suggest that it could have stood more raspberry jam in between each layer. The important thing is to make sure it doesn't ooze out of the sides, so feel free to add as much jam as you dare! When I make this again I'll probably add another tablespoon to each layer to really give the cake a fruity kick.

If raspberry's not really your thing, then strawberry jam would be just as delicious.

The white chocolate buttercream went down well too! If anything I may have been a little tight with it and could have either built up a thicker outside layer or smothered it over the jam in the middle layer. Be warned: the quantities above take into account thicker layers, so I was left with a bowl of buttercream at the end. It might be worth halving the quantities if you just want a thinner layer on the outside to purely stick the Mini Eggs and Fingers to the sponge.

So, what do you think? Given the fact that there's so much decoration this would be the perfect cake to bake with children over the Easter weekend, or if - like me - you're a child at heart then just go for it on your own instead! It's definitely worth it!

Do let me know if you give it a go in the comments below!

[N.B. This post contains affiliate links to Lakeland products.]