Recipe | Chocolate finger cake. Sponge layer cake with vanilla buttercream and a biscuit border

Sponge layer cake with vanilla buttercream, a Cadbury’s chocolate finger biscuit border and mini eggs!

If you’re a regular visitor to this blog you might be thinking, “Why is Claire posting a recipe on a Tuesday? Fridays are recipe days, aren’t they?” And you’d be absolutely right. But I wanted to post this cake recipe a bit earlier to give anyone who wanted to make it for this weekend time to get their ingredients together (i.e. stock up on mini eggs).

I’ve seen many cakes with chocolate finger borders and always thought it looked like a great idea. And it turns out, it is! 🙂

Ingredients:

250g / 8 oz butter or margarine
250g / 8 oz caster sugar
4 large eggs
250g / 8 oz self-raising flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
For the buttercream: 200 g / 7 oz butter and 400 g / 14 oz icing sugar
2 boxes of Cadbury chocolate fingers

Method:

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

Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the eggs, beating your mixture after adding each egg. Add the vanilla and flour. Stir until you have a smooth mixture.

Divide your mixture in two and spoon into the cake tins. Pop them in the oven for 20-25 minutes until they are golden brown and a knife or skewer inserted into the middle of a cake comes out clean.

Leave the cakes to cool in their tins before turning out onto a wire rack to finish cooling.

To make your buttercream, blend the 200 g butter and 400 g icing sugar together until you have a smooth paste. I added another teaspoonful of vanilla essence at this point, but that’s optional.

Spread a layer of the buttercream on the bottom layer of your sponge cake. You can pipe it on if you find that easier.

Put the other sponge cake on top to make a sponge sandwich:

Now spread another layer of buttercream on top of the layer cake and smooth it as best you can using a knife. If you have a palette knife, better.

Spread your remaining buttercream around the sides of your layer sponge cake. Don’t worry about being neat because you don’t see this layer of buttercream. It’s just there to act as glue for your border of chocolate fingers!

Now stick the Cadbury’s chocolate finger biscuits around the edge of the layer cake. The burning question is: how many chocolate fingers do I need to go around the edge of the cake? Well, for my 20-cm cakes, I needed 55 chocolate fingers to give the cake a neat border.

To finish, I decided to add a little melted chocolate to the last little bit of buttercream I had left over. I pipe this into 10 points on top of the layer cake and stuck a Cadbury’s mini egg in each one (not long until Easter!).