Malted Chocolate Cake

It's Random Recipe time again! Dom from Belleau kitchen hosts this fabulous monthly challenge which I really enjoy as it gives me the opportunity to use my ever growing pile of books. The last challenge, we had to make the first and/or last recipe from our random book. It therefore follows that this month's challenge is to bake the recipe in the middle. I used a random number generator to select my book which is Make, bake & celebrate! by Annie Rigg. I have a few other Annie Rigg books so I was really excited to find out what I would be baking.

The book has 128 pages in total including the index so that means the recipe on page 64 is my random recipe and here it is....

 this is page 64, recipe is on page 65 which is Malted chocolate cake.

Hurrah! Love malted chocolate cake and this looks like such a pretty cake. It looks quite fancy and I started thinking if I could make this for a special occasion. As luck would have it, there was a round robin email at work later that week announcing a surprise birthday party for a colleague as it's her special birthday. Unfortunately, I couldn't go as I'd already made other plans but I immediately asked if I could bake a cake for the occasion and was met with a very enthusiastic yes especially when I mentioned the cake I had in mind :)

The only downside to this is that I did not get a chance to taste the cake as it would have been rude to present a birthday cake minus one slice!! I did get to try the frosting as there was some left over and it was delicious!! I'm just going to have to make this again so I can actually try it :) 

 I used ovaltine as my malt powder as that was all I had in my cupboard. I usually have a bag or two of maltesers so no shopping required! 

 3 layer cake - butter, sugar, eggs, buttermilk, malt powder

 chopped dark and milk chocolate for the frosting 

 cook double cream+malt powder+golden syrup until just boiling and pour on to the chocolate. 

 Add in butter, a little at a time and keep stirring to make a delicious chocolate malt frosting. 

 bottom layer 

 cover with frosting 

 sprinkle crushed maltesers on top and add second layer of cake 

 cover with more frosting and repeat for the next layer 

 frost the sides as well 

 My extremely shaky writing!! The eagle eyed amongst you will notice that the frosting is not smooth - I started writing her name but ran out of space (it won't fit) so I had to scrape it off and smooth some frosting and the covered it with lots of stars!  

 pipe small dots of frosting on the edge and on top of the cake between the maltesers. 

Addendum 24/6/12


I've just realised that 2 of the bloggers I regularly follow celebrated their birthday on Friday 22nd June So a special mention to:
Gem from Cupcake Crazy Gem
Louise from Months of Edible Celebrations

Happy Birthday to Gem and Louise - this cake is for you to share :)