M&Ms pouring over a peanut butter cake is a little boys idea of heaven, this is one ultimately indulgent cake with everyone impressed with the floating sweet bag! My son wanted a 'surprise' birthday cake, which basically means he wanted me to surprise with "cool" birthday cake. So as usual I start to think about things he is into, like nerf guns, video games but I've done those type of cakes already?! Which got me thinking...intialy I was going to make some sort of chocolate sweety cake with chocolate fingers around the outside and loads of Rolo's or Malteaser's in the middle. But then it hit me...why not try and do these super cool anti gravity cakes that I've seen at the cake shows.
I've seen the kits you buy at Lakeland, which I wish I had bought, but when you wake up in the morning and decide what cake to make, you really don't have time to pop to your local Lakeland ( which is a good 2hr round trip for me specially trying to finding parking at MK). Instead I thought I would just try and wing it.
A dowel, straw, sellotape and M&M bag is pretty much all you need. If you trim down a bendy straw and tape into a bag, then bend the tip to a right angle and slide onto a dowel...and there you have it, An AWESOME floating sweet bag, Couldn't really get much easier and saved myself £20 on a kit!
My other experiment on the cake, was actually adding peanut butter to the actual cake batter. Most peanut butter cakes is generally a vanilla or chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting, but I wanted the peanut butter taste through out. I decided to add half butter and half peanut butter to the batter to add the rich peanut butter taste to the actual cake and not just the frosting.
Sticking all the M&Ms do take time, just please make sure you don't have little people around as the run away M&Ms seems to disappear into their mouth!? To be honest you might need to keep everyone out of the kitchen as even the Hubster was walking past and stealing a few from my bowl!
You could use pretty much any M&Ms, I wanted to use to the Peanut M&Ms but my local Sainsburys didn't have enough bags so opted from the Crispie M&Ms which actually worked really well
I did have one happy boy who loved his birthday cake! He ate the left overs throughout the following 1-2 weeks which is a good sign. Happy Birthday 11th Birthday to my awesome little man!
Ingredients:
Cake
150g Butter
150g Peanut Butter
250g Caster Sugar
3 Eggs
100ml Buttermilk
80g Cocoa
300g Self Raising Flour
2 Tsp Baking Powder
1/2 Tsp Baking Soda
1 Tsp Vanilla
Frosting
100g Butter
150g Peanut Butter
1 Tsp Vanilla
3 Tbsp Milk
500g Icing Sugar
150g Milk Chocolate
M&Ms 8-10 bags
In a mixing bowl adding caster sugar, peanut butter and butter and cream together.
Add eggs, buttermilk and vanilla and beat into the sugar butter mixture.
Add flour, cocoa and baking soda to the mixing bowl.
Mix the until the flours are combined into the batter.
Spoon the batter into a greased cake tin and level the top slightly. Bake in the oven at 170c for approximately 35 minutes or until baked.
Remove the cake from the tin and allow to cool completely.
Meanwhile make the frosting by adding butter and peanut to a mixing bowl and cream together.
Add vanilla and milk, then mix the butter mixture is light and fluffy.
Slowly add the icing sugar and beat into the frosting.
Keep adding the icing sugar until you have the right spreadable consistency.
Once the cake has cooled slice in half, then spread a generous layer of the frosting over the cake.
Sandwich the cake together and then start spreading the frosting over the top of the cake.
Then add frosting to the sides, covering the entire cake with frosting.
Melt the milk chocolate in the microwave and pour over the cake just covering the top and allowing some to just slightly drizzle down the sides. Add a dowel in the cake, and stick a bendy straw into a M&M bag.
Start to decorate the with sticking the M&Ms over the cake with either using melted chocolate or frosting, slowly build up the M&Ms on the dowel, this does take awhile, once you get up to the top, place the straw end on to dowel.
Anti-Gravity M&M Peanut Butter Chocolate Cake
Anti-Gravity M&M Peanut Butter Chocolate Cake
