Giant Hamburger Birthday Cake

My boyfriend loves a good beefburger and often orders a burger when we are out for dinner. So when I started thinking about ideas for his birthday cake, this popped into my head and I also thought of some burger-related birthday presents I could get him as well, such as a cookery class to learn to make burgers from scratch.

Making the cake took quite a while though in itself it wasn't too difficult. I was a little worried the cake would be a bit dry as I wanted a fairly substantial cake for the top and bottom layers so it wouldn't break up. I decided to make a white chocolate mud cake from Planet Cake by Paris Cutler for the 'bun' and a chocolate mud cake for the'burger' in the middle.

For the white chocolate mud cake you need:
300g butter
270ml water
300g white chocolate
300g plain flour
150g self-raising flour
400g caster sugar
3 eggs

Preheat oven to 180C. Melt the butter with the water in a saucepan until the butter has melted.

Turn off the heat and stir in the white chocolate until melted

 In a large bowl combine the plain flour, self-raising flour, sugar and a pinch of salt and make a well in the centre

Pour in the white chocolate mixture and beat in. Add the eggs and beat again.

Pour into a cake tin - I think I used an 8 inch pan which I sprayed with Cake Release

The recipe says to cook the cake for 1 hour 40 minutes and cover with foil half way through if the cake is cooking too quickly. I did use foil and also turned my oven down after 45 minutes and cooked it at 150C for the remaining time but even so, the top cracked and the sides came out a bit burned. I wonder if that was down to spraying the inside of the cake tin with Cake Release, if it acts like oil and heats up. Still, the cake wasn't too bad with the outer edge trimmed off.

Leave to cool then slice the cake in half through the middle - this will form the top and the bottom of your 'bun'.

Next for the 'burger' layer: chocolate mud cake. You need:

220g butter

160ml water

220g plain chocolate

125g self-raising flour

125g plain flour

50g cocoa powder

1/2 tsp baking powder

480g caster sugar (which does sound like a lot but that is right)

4 eggs

7 tsp vegetable oil

100ml buttermilk

Preheat oven to 180C. Put the butter, water and chocolate in a saucepan and stir over a low heat until melted, then remove from the heat.

In a large bowl, combine the plain flour, self-raising flour, cocoa powder and baking powder and sugar. Make a well in the centre.

In a separate bowl or jug, beat together the eggs, oil and buttermilk, then add this to the dry cake ingredients and beat in.

Next add the melted chocolate mixture and beat well.

Pour into a greased cake tin and bake for 1 hour 40 minutes.

Still a little bit overdone but again I cut off the edges. I used a 10 inch cake tin so the burger layer would be bigger than the bun and stick out from between the other layers of cake, so I could afford to trim a bit off anyway.

To decorate the cake, I used some Sugarflair caramel food colouring which I kneaded into 450g of white sugarpaste and rolled out.

Cover the top half of the white chocolate cake and trim the edges

I made some chocolate buttercream, adding a splash of cream I had in the fridge, and spread it on the bottom layer of the white chocolate mud cake.

I decided not to cover the whole of the bottom layer of the cake in sugarpaste, as you would only be able to see the edge and I didn't want the whole cake to taste of nothing but sugarpaste. So I rolled a long strip and covered the edge of the bottom cake.

Then place the chocolate cake on top. I then coloured some sugarpaste with a vibrant yellow and cut out triangles to look like cheese slices. These look the same colour as the Kraft slices we often use!

I rolled out some green sugar paste and cut it with a wavy line to represent lettuce and then cut out some circles from red sugarpaste to represent tomatoes. I stuck them at intervals around the side of the cake. It looks a bit odd at this point but looks much better when the top bun is put on!

I also made some seeds from leftover brown sugarpaste and stuck these on top of the bun. Here you can see the cheese, lettuce and tomato just sticking out.

Side-on view of the finished cake - a giant burger.

I also made some fries to go with this which I will post tomorrow!