As you might know already I was quite busy in the past month with recovering from a knee surgery and my wedding. The most annoying thing in that past month was that I was rather limited to my home, not able to stand for longer than a couple of minutes, had to walk with crutches and was completely dependent on my friends and family. Especially my best friend and Maid of Honor made an exceptional job on the wedding planning and realization of “the day”. Without her the day wouldn’t have been this perfect! I spent the last night before the Wedding at her house and brought a princess breakfast as a small “Thank you” gift.I bought a batch of Massa Ticino before we ordered the wedding cake to have a look at the “material” because I did not want to buy a pig in a poke. Massa Ticino is a sort of sugar paste like Fondant that you can roll out to cover cakes or make decorations out of. Unlike Fondant it does not sweat in the fridge, it stays softer when in contact with butter cream and it does not crack that easy. That is at least what I experienced. But back to the truffle ruffles… Amazon.co.uk keeps making book recommendations and when I ordered some DVDs the last time I thought I’d give the Busy Girls Guide to Cake Decorating a shot. When the book arrived I flipped through the pages and admired the sweet cake designs and decided to go for an evening whip-ups or a half-day-delight one day, even though I was convinced that I can’t do pretty (saw the 2 Broke Girls episode last week *chuckle*). Then the book disappeared in the shelf with all the other recipe books. When I was planning my surprise the book fell back into my hands and I fell for the pink ruffles mini cake. The description sounded doable even for beginners and so it was decided. Then came the tricky part. Being as decisive as I am it took me forever to make up my mind what cake base to use. And there it was …schabang… my 3 favorite words in one recipe: Chocolate Truffle Torte in Mich Turner’s Cake Masterclass.

For 2 15cm tins Chocolate Truffle Torte:

• 200 g melted dark chocolate, lukewarm
• 250 g butter at room temperature
• 300 g dark brown sugar
• 5 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 140 g sifted flour

Preheat the oven to 160°C with fan and line tins. For a mini cake you can also make one single depth cake in a larger brownie-dish and stamp out individual shapes. Beat the butter together with the sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one after the other, beating well after each addition. Pour in the chocolate and the vanilla extract while beating slowly. Last fold in the sifted flour. Spread the mixture evenly between the tins. Dependent on the tin and the height of your cake the baking time varies. For 2 15cm tins Mich Turner suggests 45 minutes. When in doubt rather have a look at the cake after 30 minutes, it should be still a little moist in the center, like brownies. Leave to cool in the tin before turning it out. Don’t be bothered by the crust that sinks back in a little, that’s how it should be. Just be careful when turning around that the top of your cake doesn’t fall apart.

Butter cream

• 175 g butter at room temperature
• 250 g icing sugar
• seeds of 1 vanilla bean

Beat the butter with the whisk attachment of your mixer for 1 minute. Then sift in the icing sugar, add the vanilla seeds and mix slowly to combine. Once combined whisk at full speed until light and fluffy.

Cake decoration

Once the cake is cooled cut out 3-4 rounds with 10 cm diameter for a round mini-cake. Fill each stage with butter cream and dress the whole cake evenly with the cream. Make sure you flatten the upper rim a little so that the cake gets more of a crown shape on top. Leave to cool in the fridge for at least 1 hour until the butter cream is firm. Meanwhile you can prepare the ruffles.

• Sugar paste  dyed in pink, approximately golf ball sized
• 5cm round cutter
• empty box of Toffifee
• White sugar paste, approximately 400 g
• Silver sugar dragees
• Royal Icing

Roll out the pink sugar paste to 3mm thickness. Cut out 8 circles with 5cm diameter. Create ruffles by roughly folding them in half and half again. Make sure the edges don’t stick together, so that it actually looks like a ruffle and arrange in the toffifee box to dry. Meanwhile roll the white sugar paste to a large circle with 5mm thickness on a icing sugar sprinkled worksurface. The diameter should be more than twice the height of your cake. You can watch a lot of how-to-videos but in the end I belive that only practise makes perfect. Put over the top and don’t push it onto the top. Use your hands to smothen down the sides, try not to cause any wrinkles. Smothen down like a skirt is what many descriptions say, as I am a visual person seeing it helped me a lot. trim the edges properly with a sharp knife. Transfer the cake to the serving plate and decorate the base of the cake with a snail trail of royal icing (pipe with a small round tip in a 45° angle bulb after bulb). Around the cake make 4 dots of royal icing  at 12, 3, 6 & 9 o’clock and place a silver sugar dragee on each dot. In a straight line above with the same distance  make 3 more dots and also place dragees on top. Make one dot in the middle between 2 of the made lines down at the base and glue 1 dragee, repeat 3 times. Then put 1 dot in the middle between the 1 and the 4 dot lines and 1 above this dot (don’t forget the dragees, I think you know how to proceed…). When the ruffles are firm glue 6 of them with the royal icing around the edge of the cake. Place the last 2 ruffles in the middle (well glued to the top with royal icing) et voilá!