Baking | How to Transform a Chocolate Victoria Sponge into an Easter Nest Cake

Happy Good Friday everyone! Today is the first day of the long weekend and I have spent it in the kitchen baking a cake for our Easter celebrations with my family tomorrow. I've spent a good amount of time of Pinterest seeking out inspiration but I decided that this Easter nest cake from Vanilla Bean Baker looked both delicious and fairly simple to recreate! The original recipe called for a carrot cake but I opted for a basic chocolate Victoria sponge recipe from the one and only Mary Berry. The cake mix I made was a basic four egg mix (with a bit of cocoa powder for the chocolate flavour) and was enough for two layers. I then made this chocolate buttercream recipe from BBC Food and doubled the quantity to fill and top the cake with. 

  

I used a round cutter to remove a small portion of cake from the centre to create the nest shape. Next I sandwiched the two layers together with a small layer of buttercream and then crumb-coated the entire thing. I then covered it in yet another thicker layer of buttercream before piping on the detail. I used an icing syringe with a small circle nozzle to pipe small lines of icing all over the cake to create the nest effect. This was actually quite hard to do! Piping the top of the cake wasn't too bad but the side were awful because of the effect of gravity on the icing, it kept falling off! It took me quite a long time to ice the whole cake but I definitely got better at it with practice!

To finish the cake I topped it off with a whole pack of Cadburys Mini Eggs (is it me or do you get significantly less eggs in a pack these days?!). The eggs really made the cake look like a nest, before I added them I must admit it looked a bit of a mess! I put the cake in the fridge to help the icing set as I was really worried that the buttercream would melt and ruin the nest effect. Overall I was really happy with how it turned out, it probably worked better than I expected it too as I've had my fair share of Pinterest fails! The cake looks so intricate and like a lot more work went into it than actually did. It really is just a simple chocolate cake with lots of piped icing covering it but my family thought it looked amazing so I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself!