A Naked Cake

 

I hadn't heard of a naked cake until a couple of months ago, we went to a small wedding celebration and the cake was a naked cake. They are just layer cakes served with little or no frosting on the sides. They have been a big trend at weddings for a while now, so I'm a bit late on the uptake. There are so many beautiful images of stunning looking cakes on the internet, it really does make me more determined to become better at decorating cakes. I made this cake on Monday last week and thought I might as well keep it and use it as a birthday cake for my mum at the end of the week. It's easier to ice if it's frozen so I froze it and took it out of the freezer just before I was ready to ice it. This just avoids getting crumbs in the icing. Although I still managed to get some crumbs in the icing, but it really doesn't matter too much. I made my usual, very easy Mary Berry Chocolate cake  but did the recipe times one and a half so I had 3 layers. Once cooled I levelled the uneven layers with a serrated knife. Then I wrapped each layer individually and froze them until needed. 

For the buttercream I used a vanilla frosting from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook and again I used one and a half times the recipe shown, so I had plenty of icing to play with. I had bought a palette knife for applying the icing but most of the videos I watched had a metal cake scraper to achieve that extra smooth finish, so I have since bought one and they weren't expensive from amazon.  I was so happy with the finished result even though it was far from perfect. The addition of the real flowers, which I just stuck in the cake with a cocktail stick just finished it off perfectly. I don't know whether freezing the cake made it more moist but it was one of the nicest chocolate cakes I have made in a long time. Obviously it doesn't need to be a chocolate cake. I think a vanilla sponge with a chocolate icing or coloured icing might be my next experiment. My daughter is coming up 21 at the end of the month so a nice cake will definitely be needed for that special occasion. 

I used the following amount for the icing  

Vanilla Frosting 

375g icing sugar, sifted

120g unsalted butter, at room temperature

approx 37ml whole milk

a couple of drops of vanilla extract