Mint Chocolate Cake

Last month for my mums birthday I made a Chocolate Mint Cake and it was the tastiest thing Ive ever made. I made a three layered marble cake with chocolate mint buttercream and mint chocolate decorations. I thought I would blog the recipe so you can make it yourself, I promise you its worth the time to make it.

Ingredients
Cake:                       Buttercream:
350g unsalted butter        150g unsalted butter
350g Caster Sugar           250g Icing sugar
5 eggs                      50g Cocoa Powder    
Vanilla Extract             Mint extract to taste
Cocoa Powder to taste
350g Flour

Decoration:
Milk chocolate
White chocolate
Aero bubbles
After Eights
Wispa bites
Green food colouring
Gold glitter

1. I preheat the oven to 180c and greased and lined three round cake pans.
2. I then creamed the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy.
3. I then slowly added the eggs and flour. I then divided the batter into two separate bowls.
4. To one of the mixtures I added the vanilla extract. To the other I added the cocoa powder to taste.
5. In each of the cake tins I put an equal amount of each mixture and swirled it together.
6. I then put them in the oven for 15-20 mins, until golden brown and springy to touch.I then let it cool.
7. I then made my chocolate shards by melting white chocolate and milk chocolate separately. I then spread the milk chocolate onto baking parchment, I died the white chocolate a mint green and swirled that into the milk chocolate, I then left it to set in the fridge.
8. I then made my icing by creaming the icing sugar and butter together, then adding the cocoa powder. I then added the mint extract a little bit at a time until I got the flavour I wanted. I would say if you want a strong mint flavour your buttercream needs to taste very minty as when it is mixed with the cake, the mint flavour is not as strong.
9. Once the cake was cool I put my first layer on a cake board and spread it with a generous layer of icing, I then repeated for the next two layers.
10. I then covered the whole cake with the remainder of the icing, doing a crumb coat and chill first.
11. I then decorated whilst the icing was still wet. I broke my chocolate slab into shards and put some on the cake along with the wispa bites, aero bubbles and after eights.
12. I finished by sprinkling the whole cake with gold glitter.I then put it into the fridge to set.