I'd taken for granted how easily I could whip up a fake bake cake. When I decided to do a chocolate salted caramel flavour combo I thought, "Easy-Peasy". I hit up Tesco for their delicious Finest Salted Caramel sauce which blew a huge dent into the £10 Fake Bake budget, but IMHO was totally worth it. However, it meant I had to cheap it on other stuff, namely the frosting. I went with their budget Ms Molly brand and I struggled.
The cake would simply not hold up. Admittedly I mixed some of that delicious salted caramel sauce into the saccharine frosting to temper down the sweetness, which made it far more unstable. Luckily I had a huge bag of freshly popped popcorn to cover the lumps and bumps but I was really not happy with the overall finish of the cake (despite the delicious salted caramel Twix and Kit Kat decorations).
Despite this fail, I was determined to re-attempt chocolate salted caramel, considering it is one of our best-selling cake flavours of all time. There's no way I could be doing this series WITHOUT a serious Salted Caramel contender. With a few weeks' breather to re-asses my Fake Bake strategy, I took my £10 to Morrisons this time. And I was SURPRISED! The chocolate cakes, at £2 each, were great value. Morrisons also had a delicious sounding salted caramel frosting (so no more messing around by adding extra sauce in!), as well as caramel Aero bars and McVities Gold bars. I didn't know where I was heading with the overall décor but I liked the sound of the Gold bars and also picked up some gold sprinkles. The total cost came under £10.
The Fake Bake haul wasn't incredible in terms of the variety of decorations I could get in the budget but I was pleased with my ideas of how I used all of the items in various ways, eg: making a water ganache from the caramel Aero's to drip, encrusting the Gold bars with the sprinkles and making Gold bar crumble, to achieve a really rather good looking cake. Wouldn't you agree?
Fake Bake Recipe - Chocolate Salted Caramel Cake
@angesdesucre Fake Bake Salted Caramel Chocolate Cake for under £10! My first Tik Tok tarting up shop bought cakes to look 🔥 . #cakedecorating #cakesoftiktok ♬ You And Me - Lyus
Ingredients
2x Ready-made Round Chocolate Layer Cakes (5" or 6" size)
1 tub (400g) of ready-made buttercream-style Salted Caramel frosting
McVities Gold bars
Caramel Aero bars
Golden hundreds and thousands sprinkles
Method
1. Prepare the cake decorating station with a cake turntable, angled palette knife, cake scraper, a cake board, a tablespoon, a piping bag fitted with a small star nozzle, a knife and a spatula.
2. Unbox the cakes. Smear a dollop of buttercream in the middle of the cake board on the turntable, and then place one of the layer cakes on the board. Remove any paper wrapping along the edges.
3. Decant the buttercream into a bowl and loosen it with a spatula. Dab some buttercream on the top of the cake. This layer cake is already frosted at the top so you only need to spread a little bit to even it out roughly.
You can choose to remove the chocolate curl decorations, or leave them in like I did (for height and texture). Stack the second layer cake on top. Remove the paper wrapping.
4. Remove the chocolate curls from the top layer and smooth the buttercream with a palette knife.
Pipe the buttercream along the sides of the cake. Run a cake scraper along the sides to smooth.
5. Make the Caramel Aero ganache drip. Melt 3 Caramel Aero bars (approx. 90g) in a microwave safe bowl at 30 seconds at a time, stirring between each blast. Or melt it gently over a double boiler. Heat 30ml of water (or 2 tablespoons) until just simmering and pour gently into the melted chocolate and stir to combine until smooth.
6. Dip one end of a Club bar into the ganache and cover with the golden sprinkles. Leave to rest and set aside. Chop a few club bars into small crumbly pieces.
7. Pour a tablespoon of the Caramel Aero ganache along the sides of the cake. Use the back of the spoon to push drips gently over the edge. Flood the centre with the ganache until covered.
8. Fit a piping bag with a small star nozzle tip and fill with the remaining frosting. Pipe a few swirls around the top in any pattern.
Decorate with jazzy Club bars, caramel Aero's, Club bar crumble and golden sprinkles.
I'm so pleased I revisited chocolate Salted Caramel after my initial disappointing effort. I'm not turning my back on Tesco for salted caramel, because that sauce was wonderful, but it will be a while before I return to this flavour again!
The jazzed up Gold bars were my favourite thing about this cake. And I'm really pleased to see the recreations on Instagram :)
If you CBA by making your own though, you can always order one of our popular salted caramel birthday cakes (we deliver our cakes all over London). MacDreamy is probably one of my all-time favourites with our scratch made salted caramel ganache and macarons.
Lots of love,
Reshmi xoxo
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