Salted Caramel Popcorn Cake

This cake is definitely crazy and over the top. It consists of a vanilla sponge with caramel butter cream sandwiched in between. The cake was then drizzled with salted caramel and dark chocolate, and finally topped with popcorn, honeycomb and yet more butter cream mmmmm 🙂

I made this cake for my best friend’s Birthday ❤ ! The cake isn’t exactly the prettiest or fluffiest cake I have ever baked, but (despite it being extremely sweet) it is  very tasty! You definitely can’t have too much of this cake because it is quite sickly, which I guess is a good thing if you’re trying to be healthy..?

I used a classic vanilla sponge recipe for the cake. This recipe doesn’t require any sugar thermometers or caramel making which makes it fairly quick and easy!

Enjoy! xxx

Ingredients:

• 200g caster sugar
• 200g butter, softened
• 200g self raising flour
• 4 free-range eggs
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 2tbsp. milk
• vanilla extract
• Buttercream:
• 225g butter
• 350-400g icing sugar
• 2 tbsp. milk
• 1 tin Carnation caramel
• 100g dark chocolate
• Honeycomb (see previous post)
• Popcorn

Method

Start by making the cake – preheat your oven to 180°C and  grease 2 cake tins with butter. Cream together the softened butter and caster sugar in a large mixing bowl, until pale in colour. One by one, add your eggs. Make sure you beat throughly in between each one, and don’t worry if your mix starts to curdle! Add the vanilla to the batter and then sift in the flour and baking powder. Fold well. Finally, add the milk and then evenly distribute the batter between the two cake tins. Bake for approx. 20mins, until golden brown and springy to the touch! Set aside to cool.

To make the butter cream, start by placing your softened butter in a mixing bowl. Sift in the icing sugar in 3 or 4 batches. Beat well in between (and try not get icing sugar everywhere!) Add the milk to the buttercream and beat again until you get a nice glossy frosting. Next add 2/3 of your can of caramel to the buttercream, and mix well.

Place one of your sponge cakes onto a cake board/ what you are going to serve your cake on 🙂 place a large spoonful of butter cream in the middle of the sponge and evenly spread, right up to the edges! Place the next sponge on top and repeat, but make sure you have just under half of your buttercream left!

With the remaining buttercream, carefully ice the sides of your cake, I like to use a big off-set spatula  to get the sides nice and smooth. This can be quite tricky if you haven’t done it before – start by placing a blob of buttercream on the edge of the top of the cake. Slowly tease it down the sides of the sponge and flatten 🙂

Next, heat the remaining caramel in the microwave (I gave mine a quick blast for 2o seconds). Pour the caramel on the top of the iced cake – I poured the caramel around the perimeter of the cake and gently pushed it to the edge so it trickled down the sides. I then repeated this with the dark chocolate, which I melted in the microwave (break your chocolate into small pieces and place on high heat for 1 1/2 mins, stopping and stirring the chocolate every 20 seconds).

Finally, I placed my raining buttercream into a piping bag fitted with a star nozzle. I piped the butter cream on top of the cake, and covered it in spinrkles, popcorn and honeycomb. This step is fully optional! You can do whateverrr you like to make your cake how you want it 🙂

Until next time! Sofia ❤ xx