Creative Cakes: Chocolate and Peppermint

For me, the idea of experimenting with recipes brings two of my favourite topics together under one umbrella: namely science and food.

I’ve had various ideas for cakes mulling around in my head for some time – and decided to bring one of them into reality today.

There is nothing wrong with a classic sponge cake; however, I feel that there is potential for playing around with flavour combinations in order to make a potentially more interesting finished product. The first one I considered was a combination of chocolate with ginger. This was a favourite of my late mother, and I’m quite sad that I didn’t have any trial runs whilst she was still alive, to allow her to taste my creations. That option is currently on the back burner.

This morning, another idea popped into my head: combining the flavours of chocolate and peppermint to create a chocolate peppermint cake. I was working out the logistics of how to produce this as I walked to work this morning – and later decided to create a blog post about it.

I started by making the cake – a standard chocolate sponge (see photo).

When the cakes were completely cold, I prepared a buttercream filling. The photo shows the butter and icing sugar in a bowl.

I added a couple of spoonfuls of hot water to help the mixture blend together more easily.

To flavour the buttercream, I added peppermint oil; I also added green food colouring to give the visual cue of mint flavouring, and for visual effect.

I spread the buttercream on the bottom half of the cake.

I then placed the other half of the cake on top.

For the topping, I used a mixture of dark and milk chocolate.

A lot of the cookery writers recommend melting the chocolate in a basin over a pan of simmering water. but I prefer to do it in the microwave. I feel you have more control over the heating that way. In these days of considering fuel economy, it’s probably also cheaper.

Once the chocolate had melted, I stirred it to mix it together.

I spread the chocolate on top of the cake.

As a final flourish, I topped the cake with broken-up pieces of chocolate mint crisp from a well-known brand.

The finished cake.

Update: The cake went down really well, with good complementary flavours of chocolate and peppermint. One slight issue was that the chocolate on top was really hard and virtually impossible to cut through with a knife. I would normally add a small quantity of butter to keep the chocolate softer once it has set, and would certainly incorporate that as a modification next time.

I did a modified version of the cake for Easter (although it wasn’t actually made until a few weeks after that for logistical reasons). When I spotted some mini Easter eggs that were part green and part brown, they seemed ideal for the decoration on the top. I used the mint crisp again – and as before, the chocolate was too hard, so that still needs work.

If you would like any more information on this cake, such as the quantities used etc., please contact me using the details on the home page.

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