Cicco Creations

This weekend I made a rich chocolate toffee cake for my dad’s birthday.  I had already been thinking chocolate, and then my sister suggested adding in the toffee.  I do have a mocha heath cupcake recipe, but that is VERY rich and focuses more on the mocha, so I wanted to try something different.  I did some research and found a few different toffee cake recipes that looked good.  I ended up making some combination of a few different recipes.

I started with a traditional milk chocolate cake.  As I have gotten in the habit of doing, I spritzed the cake with a simple syrup when I pulled it out of the pan.  This gives my cakes some added moisture.  I LOVE this tip and have been so pleased every time I’ve done it so far. 

For the filling, I combined a number of recipes that I had reviewed.  One recipe called for crème fraiche as the base of the filling.  I loved this idea, but I didn’t want to buy it because it can be so pricey.  And, I waited too long to make it myself (it can take anywhere from 8-24 hours).  So instead I used sour cream.  I mixed the sour cream with some cool whip, some caramel sauce and some crushed up Heath bars.  This was a little soupier than I would have preferred and the crème fraiche probably would have had more weight to it, but the taste was still wonderful. 

For the outside frosting, I simply added some melted down milk chocolate to the vanilla butter cream I had left over from the Rainbow Sprinkles cake I made last week. The flavor was great; this was a very rich frosting.  But I should have made the chocolate into a gnache before adding it to the butter cream.  The problem was that the chocolate caused the butter cream to set much firmer than I would have preferred.  This made it almost too rich – and that’s hard to do, because we are a family that LOVES our chocolate!   

I topped off the cake with the remaining bits of crushed Heath bars.  And, I used the Wilton’s Color Flame candles.  This was a great way to bring in some color while keeping the cake more on the masculine side at the same time. 

My dad was quite happy with his birthday cake and the rest of the family was just as happy to help eat it!