Animal Cracker Truffle Cake
Cake
- 430 g 15 oz plain (all-purpose) flour
- 265 g (91/2 oz) caster (superfine) sugar
- 3 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon fine salt
- 125 g (41/2 oz/1/2 cup) unsalted butter, softened
- 2 large eggs
- 375 ml (12½ fl oz/11/2 cups) full-cream (whole) milk
- 125 ml (4 fl oz/1/2 cup) vegetable oil
- 2 tablespoons Greek yoghurt (or sour cream)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
- 10 drops pink food gel
- 2 tsp strawberry flavouring
- 1 cup funfetti sprinkles
- Animal cracker truffles
- 360g white chocolate, melted
- 360g pink candy melts, melted
- 1 cup rainbow caviar sprinkles
Decorations
- Rainbow caviar sprinkles
- White chocolate drizzle
- 100g white chocolate
- 50ml whipping thickened cream
Frosting
- To fill, crumb coat and decorate this 6 layered, 8” cake you’ll need 2.5 batches of my chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream frosting.
- 1 tsp strawberry flavouring
- 4 drops pink food gel
INSTRUCTIONS
Frosting
- Split the frosting into two bowls. Colour one using pink food gel and strawberry flavouring, leave the other one white.
Cake
- Please note: to make the 6 layered cake in this recipe + the cake pops on top of the cake, you’ll need to make 3 batches of vanilla cake. All other recipes and measurements are enough to put the cake together and decorate it.
- Preheat a fan-forced oven to 140C (280F) or 160C (320F) for a conventional oven. Spray three 8” cake tins with oil spray and line the bottom with baking paper. Spray and line a rectangular baking tray with oil spray and baking paper. Set aside
- Add the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt to a large mixing bowl and mix together using a hand mixer until well combined.
- Next add the softened butter and mix on low speed until mixture reaches a crumbly sand like texture.
- Add the eggs, milk, oil, strawberry flavouring, pink food gel, Greek yogurt and vanilla extract. Mix on low speed until no dry ingredients are showing. Scrape down the bowl and mix for another 20 seconds.
- Add 1/3 of the batter into the baking tray. Split the remaining batter amongst the three 8” cake tins. I find using an ice cream scoop to help me do this makes it easy to distribute the batter evenly so that everything bakes at the same time. Add funfetti sprinkles on top and mix into the batter using a spoon.
- Bake all of the cakes for 50-60 min or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. If the pick comes out with wet batter, bake for a further 10 min at a time until fully baked. Allow the cakes to cool to room temperature inside the cake tins and then chill them in the fridge overnight. Chilling your cakes overnight makes them easier to trim and decorate. So, I bake my cakes the day before I decorate them.
Cake pops
- Crumble the sheet cake into a large mixing bowl. The finer the crumbs, the better. Add about 1 cup of frosting into the bowl and use a wooden spoon to mix until well combined.
- To make the cake pops perfectly round you’ll need a round sphere mold. I used a 1-inch silicone half sphere mold with 15 cavities. Fill the mold with the cake pop mixture. Once filled, place in the freezer to chill for 20 minutes.
- Once chilled really well, place a cake pop stick into one half of the cake pops. You’ll be making two different coloured cake pops. Pink ones and white ones. For the white cake pops, dip the cake pop halves in white chocolate. For the pink ones, use pink chocolate.
- Allow excess chocolate to drip off before adding another cake pop half on top using the melted chocolate as glue.
- Place the glued together cake pops onto a baking tray and chill in the fridge for 20 minutes. You’ll need 8 pink coated cake and 8 white chocolate coated cake pops.
- Once chilled coat the cake pops in their assigned chocolate and sprinkle with rainbow caviar sprinkles. Once completed, place on a baking tray lined with baking paper and set aside in the fridge to chill until ready to use.
To fill and crumb coat cake
- To trim your chilled cakes, use a cake leveller or large serrated knife to carefully trim the crust off the top of each cake before you trim each cake in half. You’ll end up with 6 layers of cake.
- To crumb coat your cake, add a dab of frosting onto an 8” cake board or flat serving plate. Use a small offset spatula to spread the frosting around before adding the first cake layer. Gently press down the centre of the cake layer to make sure it’s stuck to the frosting underneath.
- Add white frosting to a piping bag and frost a ring around the top of the cake. Fill the centre with more frosting. Use your small offset spatula to smoothen out the frosting before you add the next layer of cake. Repeat with the remaining layers.
- Add more frosting around and top and sides of the cake. Use the small spatula to smoothen out the top and sides of the cake, taking care to fill in any gaps in between each layer of cake.
- Use a cake scraper (otherwise known as a bench scraper) to smoothen out the frosting on the sides and top. Get it as neat as you can. This should just be a neat, thin layer of frosting which is aimed at trapping any cake crumbs so that random bits of cake crumbs don’t show up on the final layer of frosting. Chill for 2 hours or overnight.
White chocolate drizzle
- Add the white chocolate and cream into a large microwave safe bowl. Microwave for 20 seconds at a time, mixing each time until smooth.
- Use a small offset spatula to smoothen out the top of the cake. Don’t worry about getting it perfect because we’re going to come back and smoothen it out properly.
- Use the cake scraper to smoothen out the sides of the cake.
- Add sprinkles to the cake by beginning at the bottom of the cake and adding less as you go up. This will help give you a sprinkles ombré effect.
- Drizzle the top of the cake with the white chocolate drizzle.
- To prepare the swirls of frosting that go on top of the cake, lay out a large piece of plastic wrap on your workbench. Add white frosting to a piping bag and pink frosting to another bag. Pipe lines of frosting on the plastic sheet alternating between each colour. Wrap the frosting up into a log and twist each end of the log. Snip one end off using scissors. Place into a piping bag fitted with an open star tip and pipe swirls of frosting on top of the cake.
- Finish the cake off by adding the cake balls on top. If your swirl frosting is too soft to support the cake balls which can be a bit heavy, place it in the fridge for 30 minutes before placing on top of the cake.
This article and recipe adapted from this site