I’ve been wanting to try this vertical petal decorating technique for a while now and decided that making myself a birthday cake would be the perfect excuse. Yes, I’m going to have my cake and eat it too.

A 3 layer, 10cm round cake filled with crushed pretzels and salted caramel. YUM! Follow me on Instagram to see more.

I don’t know if I’ll be putting up the recipe, but the tutorial will be up very soon. For now you can enjoy one more picture.

I made this cake as an order for some friends. Was quite interesting how it all came together.

I don’t have a soccer ball mould, so I baked the bottom of the cake in a standard spring form pan and the top rounded ball part in a round metal bowl. After baking I realised the round bowl just wasn’t round enough. I cut of all the excess cake to even it out, I crumbed this and mixed it with chocolate buttercream to create a mixture that I could mould (great for cake pops as well). I took this mixture and moulded it into a very round bowl that I borrowed from my in laws, set it in the freezer and it was the perfect shape.

To make the soccer ball black and white shapes I used this template, which I found through Google images. I printed and cut it out, laid it on the cake and marked it by scoring the edges with a blunt knife, I then lined these markings with black buttercream and filled the spaces with white.

Here’s my tip for getting a really black buttercream. I made a big batch of plain buttercream and separated a small portion to be turned black. I kept adding black gel colouring until I achieved black, but lo and behold even after adding the whole bottle I still only had grey. I didn’t have any more black colouring so I panicked a little, then decided to add in some cocoa powder, this worked a treat, I had black buttercream in no time, and what’s even better it tasted really good!

In other news, my baby boy is 20 months today! I cannot believe it! Where has the time gone?

Hope this post helps anyone out there attempting to make a soccer ball cake, wasn’t so hard now that I think about it now!

Here’s that peanut butter cake I warned you all about… Talking about warnings, this cake comes with a major warning to anyone who has a serious peanut allergy ‘Do NOT try this at home folks!’ I wouldn’t be surprised if someone 2 houses away was affected by it. But for all you peanut lovers, this is a must try!

We had lamb shanks and cous cous with a grilled haloumi salad for lunch. Very Moroccan.

After lunch we tucked into this peanut buttery goodness.

It’s 2 layers of plain cake (top and bottom) and the middle layer is peanut butter brownie. All sandwiched and covered with peanut butter buttercream. For the cake I used this Bakerella recipe, I have to admit, I think the cake may have been lost in translation, it could have been better, I don’t blame the recipe though, it’s a bit hard with measurement conversions and when using different qualities of ingredients (Bakerella is American). The peanut butter brownie recipe is also from Bakerella, slightly adapted though, basically I halved the recipe and omitted the choc chips. And the peanut buttercream is all my own.

Peanut butter brownie

3/4 cups plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
3 tblsp butter, softened
1/4 cup peanut butter (I used crunchy)
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla

Pre heat oven to 180c and grease a cake/brownie pan. Mix and set aside dry ingredients (the recipe says sift, but who has the time). Cream together the butter and peanut butter till light and fluffy, add in sugars and beat till smooth. Add in the egg and vanilla until combined. Add the dry ingredients and combine on a low speed. Pour into pan and bake for 20-25 minutes or until skewer comes out clean. You could of course eat this peanut butter brownie all on its own, or you could load it with some butter cream, either way it tastes sooo good!

Peanut butter buttercream