Chocolate Flowers Cake

I was asked to make a chocolate cake for someone's birthday this week. After showing her my previous flowers cake she mentioned she liked this so I did something along the same lines. She also mentioned that she liked cherries so I put in a black cherry filling for her. I was given a budget for this one so I had to carefully keep all my ingredients in check and make sure I wasn't designing a cake that was too expensive. The rich chocolate cake recipe is more expensive than normal sponge but also decorating in chocolate can add up very quickly if you buy too many different varieties. 

I used half of my usual rich chocolate recipe:

325g Butter

325g Plain chocolate

325g Plain Flour

50ml Coffee

1tsp Vanilla Essence

1tsp baking powder

1tsp bicarbonate of soda

475g Soft Brown Sugar

5 Eggs

300ml Soured Cream

Melt the chocolate and butter together. Then mix all the ingredients together and bake in the oven for at least 1 hour, until a skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin before you remove (otherwise it just falls apart). 

I sliced the cake in half and filled with a tin of black cherry filling. This is thicker than the standard black cherries in syrup and holds its shape better in the cake. 

I then coated the whole cake in vanilla butter icing. 250g Butter and 500g Icing Sugar. I made sure this was completely smooth to give a good finish on the cake. 

Iced Cake

Next step was to prepare all the chocolate. Firstly I grated a bar of plain chocolate. Then I halved some of the buttons, minstrels and vice versas. I put these in the fridge so they were really cool and I could handle them without them melting. 

Prepared Chocolate

Firstly I used the grated chocolate for the rim of the cake. I had never tried this before but it was very straightforward to do. I press it all into the butter icing with my hands making sure there were no gaps and it was an even coating. 

Next I created a flower right in the centre of the cake using giant milk chocolate buttons. I first place a white chocolate button right in the centre of the cake and then used this to create the flower using the halved buttons. 

I then created the border on the cake by alternating the vice versas. 

Finally I filled in the remaining space making some flowers with the halved white chocolate buttons, vice versas and minstrels. 

Finished Top View

Finished Side View

Overall I was pleased with this cake and how it looked. Creating cakes like this is very effective and gives a nice finish. My customer seemed very happy with the cake and that's the most important thing.