It’s Chloe’s Birthday and we made her a cake for her party! Hooray!! But, we sliced it up too much and needed to make a replacement Birthday cake in a hurry – hence, the emergency birthday burger cake was attempted…. and bloomin easy! Give it a try, it looks really impressive!
For the cakes pre-heat an oven to 180c/160fan/350f.
Start with the vanilla ones as you’ll need those sponges cooled first, unless you have 2 ovens and can bake them all together….remember the ingredients list is for the total you need, so for the vanilla cake you need half the cake ingredients, the other half is for the chocolate one!
Beat together the butter and sugar until softened in a mixing bowl using an electric whisk. Next add in the eggs and vanilla extract, mix again until incorporated. Add in the lemon zest (or cocoa powder when making the chocolate cake) and mix through, then add the baking powder and self-raising flour. Mix through until smooth. Pour into two greased and lined 20cm cake tins… bake for 25 minutes or until well risen and a skewer inserted comes out clean.
Allow the vanilla cakes to cool, now make the chocolate ones, remembering that you omit the lemon zest for the cocoa powder this time, but follow the same instructions with the remaining half of the ingredients – 4 eggs etc… bake the chocolate cakes and allow to fully cool.
It’s a really good step to level the cakes once they have finished so that they stack neatly on top. Leave one vanilla sponge rounded for the top though.
For the buttercream beat the butter with an electric whisk until smooth in a large bowl, gradually add the icing sugar, sifting it in until smooth, add a little milk if needed a tsp at a time to loosen if necessary. Keep most of the buttercream in the bowl but take around 3tbsp out into 4 separate bowls – one add the cocoa powder, one add the green colouring, another the red, the final one the yellow… these will be the frosting and toppings. For the bulk of the buttercream that is left you want to try to make a light coffee / caramel colour. Start with a little pink icing, and work it in with a spatula or electric whisk, then a little brown, then some yellow. Work in small batches to not dye the buttercream too far and keep tweaking it til you get a light brown sort of shade… it’ll look great later!
Before using any of the buttercreams they may firm up a bit if stood still for too long, so give a good stir to warm the butter up & loosen to make piping / placing on the cake easier.
To build the cake, take a vanilla sponge as a base, cover the side with the caramel coloured frosting and spread with jam on top, place a chocolate cake on top, frost the top of this cake with chocolate buttercream. Roll out and slice the orange icing into small triangles and drape 3 or 4 of the triangles over the burger meat cake to look like cheese hanging off of it! Now add another chocolate cake on top, frost the top of it again with chocolate frosting.
Decorate the remaining top bun (vanilla cake!) in the caramel coloured bun frosting on a separate board to save the rest of it getting covered in icing! Once you are happy, lift on top of it and ensure it is all stacked into place.
Fill the gaps between the cheese with mustard (yellow) and ketchup (red) frosting, using spoons to push the icing into gaps. Pipe the green icing on the next level using a star nozzle to look like lettuce.
Finish with white chocolate chips on the top bun to look like sesame seeds! Amazing… this took just 2 hours to make! Enjoy.