A bowl of spaghetti, anyone?

This cake was a practice cake, as I needed to test both my new ball shaped cake tin and the structural durability of the underside of a ball for a future cake order.

This cake I took to work again to spoil my work colleagues, and it was a caramel cake, with my own caramel filling recipe (not as sweet as caramel flavoured cakes usually are).

The idea to put "spaghetti" on top of the cake came from the bowl-like shape of the cake, as well as from the fact that I had a still unused spaghetti piping tip laying around in my kitchen drawer. The "meatballs" are cut up Twix bars.




Base (recipe for ø24 cm cake):

1,25 dl        plain flour
1,25 dl        potato flour
3 tbsp         caramel flavoured cocoa powder
1,5 tl           baking powder
2,5 dl          granulated sugar
6                 eggs

Caramel flavoured cold hot chocolate to moisten the cake.


Beat eggs and sugar until you can "draw" the figure eight on top of the mix with the batter, and it stays visible for a short while. Mix all the dry ingredients together and carefully add to the egg-sugar mix through a sieve. Pour the cake mix into a greased and breadcrumbed cake tin and bake in 175°C for 30-40 minutes. When the top of the cake looks brown, you can cover it with aluminium foil to avoid it burning.



Filling (two layers):

240 g         caramel pudding
3 dl             double cream
120 g         vanilla flavoured quark
4                 leaves of gelatin
1,5 tbsp     water



Soak the gelatin leaves in cold water for 5-10 minutes. Whip the cream.
Mix the caramel pudding and quark together in a separate bowl.
Drain the gelatin leaves of excess water and mix with boiling hot water until they dissolve.
Add the gelatin to the pudding and quark mix. Add whipped cream. 

Spread the filling in between three layers of moistened cake, cover the cake with cling film and let set in a fridge for a few hours (preferably until the next day) before decorating.



Caramel butter cream:

125 g        margarine
1,5 tsp      vanilla sugar
30 g          caramel flavoured cocoa powder
220 g        icing sugar
2 tbsp       milk


Whisk soft margarine and vanilla sugar until slightly foamy. Mix cocoa powder and icing sugar together in a separate bowl and add to the margarine in a few batches while whisking. Add milk with the last batch and mix evenly. 
If the butter cream feels too stiff to spread on top of the cake, you can soften it by heating it in a microwave 5-10 seconds at a time.