Special Meals Meg: White Chocolate mudcake (used for the Scout cake)

I have now said goodbye to my dear little niece and nephew and beloved sister-in-law from our little humble abode, and so rather than thinking about how empty my house feels all of a sudden, I am keeping myself busy!! So, in order to do that, I thought it might be a good time to write up the recipe for the White Chocolate mudcake that I used for the Scout cake for Neil’s Grooms cake.

When I suggested making a mudcake for the wedding, none of my American friends knew what this was! I was flabbergasted!!! So I did a little research and found out that mudcakes come from an American version of Mississippi Mudpie which is a very dense cake that apparently resembles the banks of the Mississippi river. So the mudcake is a derivative of this, which is very dense, moist and rich! Perfect to shape into a car!!!

I have made this white chocolate mudcake many, many times but never in this quantity!!! I am going to do the recipe for a regular sized cake, so ignore the quantities of the pictures! (Although, for those of you who ate the Groom's cake, you may not want to know how much butter and sugar you ate....especially for those of you who ate six pieces!!).

Ingredients

250g butter

150g white chocolate

2 cups caster sugar

1 cup milk

1 and 1/2 cups plain flour

1/2 cup self raising flour (and 1/2 teaspoon baking powder if cooking in the UK)

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

2 eggs

Method:

1. Combine butter, chocolate, sugar and milk in a saucepan

2. Stir over low heat until smooth and resembling pure gold! This will vary depending on how many quantities of the cake you are making, but generally should take about 10 minutes with the regular quantity. The butter is always the last to fully melt. Be sure to mix regularly, as the white chocolate will melt on the bottom of the pan and burn if you leave it unattended.

3. Sift both flours into a large bowl (I don't want to damage my Le Creuset pot)

4. Pour in the liquid gold mixture while still warm and beat with an electric mixer

5. Add eggs one at a time and beat well after each addition (only for 30 seconds or so though)

6. Add vanilla extract (why not see a photo of this step too!!)

If you are wanting a regular white, white chocolate mudcake, this is the end of the line for the cake batter. However, I am going to show photos of how I made the actual scout cake with the marbling, cause frankly, it looks awesome in the pan!

7. If you are going to marble any cake, separate out 1/3 of the cake mix to be coloured, it shouldn't be half the mixture as you want the cake to still be predominantly the base colour. Choose your colour for marbling and add it to the 1/3 mixture that you have put into a new bowl.

8. Prepare your cake tin. The best way for this cake is to spread butter in the cake tin with either paper towel (good quality paper towel that doesnt break apart while greasing) or the back of the paper that a block of butter comes in, and then shake flour through the tin to make it non stick.

9. I created a checkerboard effect in my pan, which did take a while, but for my first attempt at marbling, I must say, it worked like a charm! Here's what you need to do:

10. Keep going until you've done the entire first layer and then start building the layers up evenly. When you have used all of the cake mixture you then need to marble. This is done by gently sweeping a knife through the checkerboard, without touching the bottom.