White Chocolate & Raspberry Checkerboard Cake

My next birthday creation was for Phoebe and came soon (too soon! 5 days!) after making the chocolate orange masterpiece... talk about slave driving! It's hard being the resident baker! (Not really, I freaking love it!) 

I decided that we'd worked our way through enough rich chocolate and that the next cake called for something jammy. I had seen a checkerboard "how to" post on Pinterest and I was itching to try it! 

The Plan:-

The Ingredients:-

I decided on a basic sponge recipe for this cake. The recipe is so ingrained in my brain, and as it was my granny that taught it to me, it's one of the few times that I still work in ounces. 

For the sponge:

200g/8oz soft marg or butter
200g/8oz caster sugar
200g/8oz SR flour
4 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
Pink food colouring

For the Filling:

400ml cream
400g white chocolate
Raspberry jam (seedless is probably best for filling cakes)
1 Packet of Raspberry fruit flakes 

I took this ganache recipe from a BBC recipe, although I had a few problems with it... (stay tuned for a disaster)


The Method:-

1. Begin with the ganache so that it has time to cool and thicken while you're making the sponges. Put the chocolate and cream into a bowl and heat gently over a bain marie until melted. Set aside, and come back to it later... (Hopefully not finding what I found... as you will see below... oh the suspense)
2. I always begin by creaming together half the sugar and half marg until light and fluffy. (Some prefer to use the all-in-one method but I always find the creaming method give you a much lighter sponge and it's the method I have always used!) 
3. Add 2 of the eggs one by one, mixing well in between.
4. Sift in half of the flour, half tsp of baking powder and fold in to the mixture. Add a few drops of pink colouring or more, depending on how bold you would like the colour to be. 
5. Split the mixture between two tins (if you're lucky enough to have two... or you could do one, wash up, and then the other, like me!) and bake for roughly 15-20 mins in the oven or until the sponge is, well, spongey when you press it, or equally you could insert a skewer and you know it's ready if it comes out clean. 
6. Repeat this process with the other half of the ingredients, leaving out the colouring so that you have 4 thin sponges. 2 pink, 2... not pink. 
7. Now's the fun/complicated bit...  

Creating the Checkerboard:-

You need to cut a ring from each of the cakes. You could use a ruler, but my mind isn't mathematical and I got fed up measuring. I decided to rely on my eyes! So, cut a circle on the cake about and inch or two from the edge. And another about an inch from the centre so that your sponge is now in three parts and you can remove the middle ring. Do this with each of the cakes and begin rearranging. Take the pink ring and put it with the plain sponge, and visa versa. 

Now you are ready to assemble, so you return to the hopefully thickened ganache. Well, mine wasn't. At all. So trying not to panic, I turned a blind eye, and assembled the layers, with a nice layer of raspberry jam and then a dribble of ganache. Which then proceeded to leak everywhere. 

To cover the disastrous sides I made some white chocolate shards by spreading white chocolate onto greaseproof paper. I gently peeled the shards of and stuck them around the edge of the cake. 

With a pool of ganache sitting around the cake, acting as a sort of moat... I proceeded to stress. Nowhere online, could I find a way to save my runny ganache and as a last ditch attempt I reached for my electric whisk. Cream thickens when you whisk it... there's cream in the ganache... so it should thicken right? RIGHT! I arrived and wonderful, mousey, thick, white chocolate ganache and the cake was saved! 

I spread the lovely stuffy across the top and loaded the rest into a piping bag (Yes, it was pipable!) and piped decoration around the edges. 

A sprinkling of fruits flakes later and I had a lovely White Chocolate and Raspberry Cake... (albeit with a moat)

Job Done!

TIP OF THE BAKE : Whisk Ganache to thicken it!! 

Until next time xx