Recipe | Double chocolate Easter cake! With mini eggs!

Posted in Baking by

Spring is almost here. To me, that sounds like a good excuse for chocolate cake!

Chocolate easter and spring season cake. Two layer chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling and green grass topping frosting decorations with eggs 4

My family call this recipe “THE” chocolate cake recipe. My mum’s had it for years and I think it’s from an old copy of Good Housekeeping magazine. The oil in the recipe means the chocolate cake is dense, moist and a bit like fudge cake. It’s gorgeous! Although it’s still a little early for Easter eggs, spring is definitely in the air and this inspired the grass buttercream topping. Oh, and I just love Cadbury’s mini eggs, so any excuse to use them, I take it! 🙂

Ingredients

  • 10 oz / 280 g self-raising flour
  • 3 tbsp cocoa powder
  • 6 oz / 170 g caster sugar
  • 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 0.5 pints / 280 ml / 3.4 fl oz vegetable oil (sunflower oil or any of your choice).
  • 0.25 pints / 140 ml of milk (I used full fat)
  • 3 tbsp golden syrup
  • 0.5 tsp vanilla essence

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C / Gas Mark 4 / 350 degrees F. Grease and line two circular 8-inch / 20-cm tins with baking paper.

Sift the flour and cocoa powder into a bowl. Add the sugar.

Make a well in the centre of the mixture and add the milk and the bicarb of soda. Add the syrup and oil to the rest of the ingredients and beat until mixed well.

Pour the mixture into your tins. Like this:

Chocolate easter and spring cake mixture in circular cake tins for sandwich

Bake for 25-30 minutes until a knife comes out clean from the centre of the cake. Take out of the oven and leave to cool in the tins. Like this:

Freshly-baked chocolate easter cakes for spring

Decoration

I made a batch of buttercream by mixing 180 g / 6.5 oz butter with 360 g / 13 oz icing sugar (I should say, at this point, that I think I made too much. I had some of the green icing left over…). Once I had a smooth buttercream, I split the batch in half. To one half I added 45 g / 1.5 oz of melted dark chocolate. I used this chocolate buttercream as the filling in the cake sandwich. I used a spatula to dollop it onto the bottom layer of cake and used a knife to spread it out into an even layer. Then I put the other cake on top. Like this:

Two layer sandwich with chocolate buttercream filling

To the other half of the buttercream batch I added green food colouring until I was happy with the colour. To get a grass effect, there is an actual piping tip for grass/ hair effect (amazing, I know), but I don’t own one. Instead, I used a small, star-shaped tip to get the grass effect on top of the chocolate sandwich cake. I don’t mind telling you this took a good five minutes and a steady hand! Here’s a (bad) photo of the grass icing work in progress:

Chocolate easter and spring cake. Two layer sandwich cake with chocolate buttercream filling and grass effect topping. Piping in progress

To finish off I used Cadbury’s mini eggs to top the cake and some wafer daisies (no, I didn’t make them. I cheated and bought them. Enough is enough!).

Chocolate easter and spring season cake. Two layer chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling and green grass topping frosting decorations with eggs 3

Chocolate easter and spring season cake. Two layer chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling and green grass topping frosting decorations with eggs 2

It slices beautifully too!

Chocolate easter and spring season cake. Two layer chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling and green grass topping frosting decorations with eggs 6

A final photo!

Chocolate easter and spring season cake. Two layer chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling and green grass topping frosting decorations with eggs 5

 

If you’re looking for other chocolate cake recipes, you could try:

Chocolate fudge cake with chocolate buttercream icing cut view

 

My chocolate fudge cake with chocolate buttercream rosettes.

 

 

 

Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge frosting white chocolate shavings and gold sugar stars cut

 

Heavenly chocolate cake with chocolate fudge frosting.

 

 

 

 

Claire Huston / Art and Soul

60 thoughts on “Recipe | Double chocolate Easter cake! With mini eggs!”

    • Thank you! I was really pleased with how it turned out. I thought, “oh no!” when I discovered I didn’t have the “grass piping tip”!! (who knew that existed?). But the star tip did a good job in the end 🙂
      And it tastes lovely, which is the most important thing.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  12. I read this last night and have been thinking about it all day…YUMMY! I really like cakes made with oil, I’ve got a friend who does an amazing carrot cake with oil…it can give a really nice texture. I’ll be giving this a go soon certainly…will let you know how I get on (I can say now that sadly the decoration will not similar in any way!) xx

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

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  22. I’m not sure if I’ve done this right…smells amazing but my mixture didn’t look like your mixture – there was no pouring! And it’s sunk. Hmm.Still think it will be delicious but can I just check about the mixing part. When I made a well and put the milk etc in should I have mixed it up THEN added the rest of the ingredients? I think I need some clarity in the putting things in a bowl and mixing stage! Sorry…you are dealing with a total novice!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    • No necessarily. You could stir through the milk and the bicarb first, just to make sure the moisture activates the bicarb, but you shouldn’t have to. In fact, you should be able to put all the ingredients in a mixer in one go and blitz it together and it should work. If there was no pouring, maybe you didn’t use enough milk and oil? Half a pint of milk and quarter pint of oil?
      Did it at least taste nice? :/

      Like

      Reply

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  24. Hi Claire,

    I hope you’re well.

    My name’s Matt, and I’m from the dotcomgiftshop blog.

    We are currently writing a post for our blog about our favourite Easter bake ideas. While researching, we found your double chocolate easter cake recipe – and we’d really like to give it a mention in our post, and maybe use an image (giving you and your blog full credit, of course).

    If you would rather we did not mention your blog or use an image, do let me know and I will omit it. I will also happily show you the post once it has gone live on our blog.

    All the best,

    Matt
    —
    http://www.dotcomgiftshop.com
    blog@dotcomgiftshop.com

    Like

    Reply

  25. Hi Claire,

    This is just a line to let you know that the article I mentioned recently is now live on the dotcomgiftshop blog.

    Here’s our article:

    6 EASY EASTER BAKES
    https://www.dotcomgiftshop.com/blog/6-easy-easter-bakes

    We think your blog post is really useful and we hope you like the mention. Of course, if you would rather we remove your contribution, just let me know.

    If you’d like to share or mention this article to your followers, here’s a handy tweet link: http://bit.ly/easter_bakes_tweet
    – or if you prefer Facebook, just use: http://bit.ly/easter_bakes

    Please let me know if you have any questions or comments – always good to hear back from bloggers we’ve featured.

    All the best,

    Matt
    —
    dotcomgiftshop

    Like

    Reply

      • Hi Claire,

        I’m glad you like the article; thank you for being involved! Let me know if you attempt the brownies – i’d love to see how they turn out 🙂

        Have great weekend!

        Matt

        Liked by 1 person

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