The penultimate bake.

Week 51, Bake 51. 

On the 13th of December it was my brother's 25th birthday. Sadly he spent the day where he lives in London, so I couldn't bake this for him on his actual birthday, which annoyed me as I was super excited about creating this bake. Anyway, I digress. I decided to create a themed cake as I am rubbish at novelty cakes and wanted to do something a little bit special. When we were kids we used to always get Lego for Christmas and our birthdays. To be honest, we were obsessed. Each year going to the Lego convention, being 'Gold' members of the Lego club and even getting VIP tickets to Lego land before it opened. The love of Lego has never gone away, and so I decided to create a Lego cake for him to help him remember his childhood (plus it would be so much fun for me!). I created two cakes to create a tier effect, the lower tier is a chocolate cake and then the upper tier is a vanilla cake. So here it is my Lego bake.

Ingredients:
For the chocolate cake:

• 200g of butter
• 50g of milk chocolate
• 350g of plain flour
• 400g of caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
• 50g of coco powder
• 2 eggs
• 200ml of milk with a splash of lemon juice in it.

For the vanilla cake:

• 200g of unsalted butter, softened
• 200g of caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
• 250g of self-raising flour
• 3 tablespoons of milk

And everything else!

• Icing sugar
• 200g of butter
• splash of milk
• Jam
• Royal icing
• Assorted food colouring
• Lego men 

(Be prepared... this may take a while!)

Method:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 170c. 
2. Melt the chocolate and  butter together making sure not to burn. 
3. In a large bowl mix the flour, sugar, a pinch of salt, bicarbonate of soda and cocoa powder together. 
4. Break the eggs and whisk them with milk. Boil the kettle.
5. Now add the butter/chocolate mix to the dry ingredients, and whilst whisking add the eggs/milk also into the bowl. 
6. Now mix 150ml of boiling water into the cake mixture. 
7. Line and grease a 23cm spring pan cake tin then pour the mixture into it and cook for 45 minutes (or until you put a knife in and it comes out clean).
8. Now make the vanilla sponge. Cream the butter and sugar together until light, pale and fluffy. 
9. In a jug, beat the eggs together and slowly add this to the butter/sugar mixture whilst still beating it. 
10. Add in the vanilla essence. 
11. Now sift the flour and fold it in. At this point you can also add the milk. 
12. Line and grease two 19cm sandwich tins and divide the mixture into two. 
13. Cook at the same temperature for 18-20 minutes or until slightly golden. 
14. Once out of the oven, take them out of their tins and pop them onto a cooling rack. 
15. Beat the butter and icing sugar together to create a butter-cream icing, use some milk to loosen this up.
16. Once the cakes are cool, cover them both with the butter-cream icing. This will help the royal icing to stick. 
17. Make the vanilla cake by putting jam in the middle, like a Victoria Sponge. 
18. Roll out some royal icing to cover the cakes. 
19. On the top tier, slice a quarter of the icing off and peel it away. Now using some different colour icing create Lego blocks so it looks like the cake is made of Lego. 
20. Make bigger Lego blocks out of the left over icing to have at the base of the cake. 
21. Pipe any words you want on it and then assemble your Lego figures on it.

After all that work, all I can say is that I hope he likes it!