Ok, so it seems like my posts are once a year right now. I guess I just haven’t been making anything particularly exciting these days, partially due to a lack of time, and part due to my ongoing wrist problems – Bah!

Anyway, I thought I would share this wonderfully easy and tasty cake recipe, and my simple take on my daughter’s new favourite obsession – Pete the Cat.

Note: I took this picture after we had already starting cutting into it!

The recipe is one I was given by one of my coworkers, who in turn was given it by one of her old coworkers, and now I share it with the internet so everyone can make it. What I like about it is that no softening of butter is required (score!) and it comes together quickly and easily into a sheet cake form, which is of course excellent for kids as they don’t really care all that much for fancy cakes, but will keep coming up to you to ask “More cake?” “More cake?” “More cake?”……. I have created a monster.

Chocolate Cake Brownies Recipe (courtesy of the CLS recipe swap grapevine)

Ingredients

Cake:

260g/ 2 cups flour

420g/ 2 cups sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

225g/ 2 sticks unsalted butter

250mL/ 1 cup water

3 tbsp cocoa powder

2 large eggs

125mL/ 1/2 cup buttermilk

1 tsp vanilla extract

Icing:

113g/ 1 stick unsalted butter

2 tbsp buttermilk

1 tbsp cocoa powder

265g/ 2 cups powdered (icing) sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

Sprinkles (optional)

Method

Cake:

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C, and grease/line a 8×12″ pan.

In a large bowl, mix flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda.

Put butter, water, and cocoa powder in a saucepan and heat over medium heat. Bring the mixture to a boil, then pour into the flour mixture and mix until smooth.

In a small bowl, beat together eggs, buttermilk, and vanilla extract. Add this to the flour mixture and mix together. Pour into a greased/lined jelly roll pan and bake for 30 minutes.

Icing:

Put butter, cocoa powder, and buttermilk in a saucepan and heat over low heat, mixing occasionally. When well blended, add powdered sugar and vanilla extract.

Pour the mixture over the cake and spread evenly using an offset spatula.

To decorate, I used the same technique to make Pete the Cat’s face as I used to make Brown Bear, but this was much much easier.

I went off this image below, from the artist’s website:

But printed it out slightly bigger, then traced all the key components. His face is one piece, then nose is one piece, and each eye is three pieces.

Once I had all the templates, it was just a case of colouring some gumpaste and cutting them out.

His face is made of gumpaste coloured with Americolor gel paste in Royal Blue, then painted with additional colour to make it look painted, like the original Pete paintings. The nose and white parts are just plain gumpaste, whereas I used Americolor gel in Lemon Yellow and Super Black for the remaining pieces of his eyes.