First I made ordinary sponge cake mixture and separated it into three bowls. The smallest I coloured with a mix of yellow and red food colouring to be orange, one I coloured with melted chocolate (I refuse to use cocoa in cake baking; I don't think the resulting cake tastes anything like chocolate. I always use half milk, half plain chocolate melted and mixed into the cake mixture) and the third I left ordinary cake-coloured.
I then used the three colours to make something resembling a sliced-in-half Creme Egg in a cake tin. I'd forgotten that my Mrs Beeton's recipes, while making lovely cake, make small cakes unless you double the ingredients so I ended up making a second lot of cake mixture to fill my two cake tins. I wanted it to be a biiiiiiig cake.
It would've been easier to double the ingredients, bake it all in one LARGE cake tin and slice it at the end, for colouring reasons that'll become clear later but we don't have a big cake tin. Yet.
Into this particular tin, I placed mini Creme Eggs at regular intervals in the chocolate "shell" and covered them with mixture, hoping they'd be gooey-centered after baking. Unfortunately the fondant centres boiled to almost nothing. The chocolate tasted nice still but it may be better to come up with a way of adding the Eggs afterward.
The coloured mixture baked to half a cake that looked like this (in this one I covered the orange centre over with normal mix in an attempt to form an orange blob in the centre when I put the two halves together. I ruined this by putting the two halves together another way to form a flatter cake. Sigh.)
Put together and filled with normal buttercream, the cake looked like this...
...and was then promptly covered in my favourite chocolate fudge icing, made with melted chocolate, butter, an egg and a ton of icing sugar. It. Tastes. Awesome.
All that remained was to decorate with an appropriate Easter theme. The chicks are marzipan coloured yellow with food colouring, the 'nest' is marzipan rolled into strips, coated in melted chocolate and left to set in the fridge before I started the cake. I have to say; marzipan coated in chocolate? So nice. The eggs are normal Cadburys Mini Eggs.
And finally, what the cake looked like when cut. You can see why making one cake and splitting it would make a better Creme Egg imitation: the chocolate 'shell' would line up and it'd be easier to make the orange centre round. That said, I think if I hadn't changed the way I put the layers together at the last minute, it still would've looked pretty Creme Egg-esque.
It tasted awesome, especially warmed up. I'm definitely making it again next year. ^_^
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