Salted caramel dribble cake = winner!

Mr D had a charity bake sale at his office in celebration of the World Cup this week.  He managed to pick his second team – Sweden out of the proverbial (and I think actual) hat and decided that Salted Caramel would be a good option.  Though this is a long way from my favourite cake flavour, I had to concede that he was right, it is absolutely en vogue at the moment so we set about looking up recipes.

We had both previously made the rather complicated (though delicious) recipe from Martha Stewart and decided that with a jam-packed weekend of chores, shopping, dinner and world cup matches, we needed a simpler version.  Enter stage left, Jane’s Patisserie… what a dream that recipe is !

Ingredients

Cake Ingredients

• 400 g Unsalted Stork
• 400 g Light Brown Sugar
• 7 Large Eggs
• 400 g Self Raising Flour
• 2 tsp Baking Powder
• 4 tbsp Whole Milk

Salted Caramel Buttercream

• 250 g Unsalted Butter (room temp)
• 600 g Icing Sugar
• 175 g Salted caramel dipping sauce

Decoration

• 200 g Salted caramel dipping sauce
• Rolos
• Swedish flags!

 

Method

For the cake:

1. Preheat the fan oven at 180 degrees and grease and line four Wilton’s easy layer cake tins, we will use two of these again for six layers.
2. Cream the Stork and sugar in a freestanding mixer, slowly at first to completely combine, then on a higher setting for c. 4-5 minutes until it is light and fluffy.
3. Whilst this is whisking away… weigh and sieve the dry ingredients and crack the eggs into a jug with the milk, beat these gently to break them up.
4. Once the stork and sugar mix is nice and fluffy, turn the mixer down to a low setting and in one hand gently pour the egg and milk mixture in a slow steady stream and in the other use a dessert spoon to add a spoon of the dry ingredients to help the egg to be thoroughly absorbed by the mixture, without it curdling.  It will still taste good but won’t rise as well.
5. Spoon the mixture between the four cake pans to two thirds in order to allow for the appropriate rise.  You can weigh this if you like to ensure absolutely equal layers, but we did this by eye. Ensure you hold back enough for another two or three sponges of the same size.  Use a silicone spatula to level the mixture and put a small dip in the middle of the mixture to counter the doomed cake rise.
6. Bake for 12-15 minutes, once they have started to come away from the sides of the pan and are springy to touch.  Leave these on a cooling rack for 10-15 minutes until cool enough to remove from the cake pans.
7. Wash up the cake pans, then re-grease and line 2 or 3 of these and repeat the spooning in the mixture process and pop in the oven.
8. Again, once baked, leave to cool.
9. Whilst this is happening, you can make the salted caramel icing.

For the icing:

1. Add the butter (one full pack) to the freestanding mixer, then sieve 100g at a time into the bowl and gently combine on a low setting, in order to minimise the dust and spillage. Once fully combined, turn the mixer up to a high setting and leave it for 4-5 minutes until that becomes light and fluffy.
2. Once you are happy with the butter icing, add around 175ml of the caramel dipping sauce and gently work this through the icing.
3. In order to ice the cake, take a cake board or serving dish/plate/stand and dab a small amount of butter icing onto this before placing the first layer down, in order to keep the cake firmly in place but smoothing it over the surface.
4. Put the first layer onto the board and put a tablespoon of icing in the middle, spreading outwards with a palette knife, add a little more if needed.
5. Repeat this process, until you are happy with the height of the cake.  Don’t worry about being too tidy at this point, as you’ll go over the edges and clean it up when you the crumb coating.
6. When you get to the last layer and top of the cake, add the same tablespoon of icing on top and spread over the cake.  Then take small amounts of the icing and gently smooth down the sides, filling in any gaps in layers or small holes made when removing the cake lining.  Go over the whole of the cake to cover it all in a thin layer of butter icing.
7. When you are happy with this, take a mug and fill it with cold water.  Put your palette knife in this and tap gently to avoid much water contact, then smooth over the outside of the cake cut it neatly and closely to the sponge.  You will need to turn the cake as you go but the effort will be worth it.
8. Chill the cake in a fridge for an hour or overnight.  We did this overnight.
9. After this you can either do another layer of icing, if you’d like more coverage, or go ahead and get the salted caramel dribble done.
10. If you are using the Carnation Caramel you will need to add some sea salt to loosen it and make it of dribbling consistency.  As it turned out the salted caramel dipping sauce was already of a suitable texture, so we took a dessert spoon and got right to it.  Always start with the dribble around the edge of the cake, take a small(ish) amount of caramel on your spoon and nudge it off the spoon down the edge of the cake from the top.  You can use more or less depending on how far you want the dribble to go down and if you want it to pool at the bottom or not.
11. Once you have finished the ‘dribble’ part of the decoration, put another couple of spoons of the caramel sauce on top of the cake and spread either with a palette knife or the back of the dessert spoon in a swirling motion in order to create circular swirls in the caramel on top.
12. When this was successfully completed we put the remaining icing into a piping bag with a nice piping tube on the end, you can use whatever you prefer and piped little ‘lucky gem’ style blobs onto the top in a circle.  We then filled the circle with Rolos, which are actually much nicer than I remember, if a little smaller.
13. The cake definitely needed some height and if it hadn’t been for the Swedish flags which we knew were going on top the following day, we’d have added something else like curly wurlys to add some.  But the flags worked perfectly and gave it the extra height that such a cake needs.
14. We again chilled the cake overnight in an enormous cake carrier ready for transport the following morning.
15. We also made fifteen cupcakes, 7 vanilla and 8 lemon.  We made the icing similarly flavoured to the cakes and coloured them brightly using gel colours in order to create the correct colouring for the Swedish flag when they were placed together in the correct order.
16. All looked wonderful and we surprisingly won the bake off!  Hooray 🙂  There were some amazing cakes on display, mostly football themed and we particularly liked the football pitch ones and the one actually made in the shape and iced like a football.  Everyone did so well and of course it is always the charity which is the winner in the end.  Congratulations to all who took part, absolutely amazing baking!!!