Chocolate and Caramel layer cake

Dear Diary,

After the simple layer cake last time me and my baking friends decided to go for the fancy one we saw a recipe for, so the Chocolate and Caramel layer cake came along!

The baking of the cakes went quite well, they all worked and none of them were too risen. Any that were to rounded on top to stack, we used a cake cutter to level them.

225g very soft butter , plus extra for greasing

225g golden caster sugar

175g self-raising flour

85g ground almonds

1 tsp baking powder

3 eggs

150ml pot natural yogurt

1 tsp vanilla extract

5 tbsp cocoa powder

For the caramel and choc-caramel cakes:

225g very soft butter , plus extra for greasing

175g light muscovado sugar

50g dark muscovado sugar

175g self-raising flour

85g ground almonds

1 tsp baking powder

3 eggs

150ml pot natural yogurt

1 tsp 

1 tbsp cocoa

To assemble: 

397g canned caramel 

140g dark chocolate

140g milk chocolate

300ml double cream

1. Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Grease and line bases of 2 x 20cm sandwich tins with baking parchment. For the Vanilla & chocolate sponges, mix all the ingredients, apart from the cocoa, together with an electric whisk. Scrape half the mix into a second bowl and whizz in the cocoa. Scrape into the tins and bake for 20-25mins until a skewer poked in comes out clean.

2. Repeat step 1 for the Caramel & caramel-choc sponges, again leaving cocoa out of the first mixing, then splitting the mix in half and whizzing the cocoa into one batch. Cook as above.

3. While sponges are cooling, melt the dark and milk chocolate together in a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Remove from the heat, stir in the cream and cool or chill until spreadable.

4. When the sponges are cool, spread a third of the caramel over the Vanilla sponge and top with the Caramel sponge. Spread over another third of the caramel and top with the Caramel-choc sponge, then the final third of caramel and top with the Chocolate sponge. Spread the chocolate icing over the whole cake to serve. 

Like I said before the baking of the cake went well but making it up was a nightmare! Because we used caramel in the middle of the cake layers it was impossible to keep it upright! then then we added the chocolate on the outside it just made it worse!

The next day when it had settled down a bit it was easier but we still need to work out how to keep it upright with the caramel. The actual taste of the cake was fantastic though, using the yoghurt in the mixture made such a good difference and so did the flour we used (supreme sponge from McDougall's) and it was so light and spongy so would definitely do it again with other sponges!

Love Lousia xxx