A friend of mine had his birthday last week and, well, let’s just say that he’s not a huge fan of the cute and fluffy variety of animal. I had to do a presentation with him last year, and I deliberately added pictures of cute baby seals to every single one of my slides, just for a laugh. He made me take them out (to be fair, the presentation wasn’t even particularly related to seals – it was about biodiversity and climate change, so they were only briefly mentioned), but I managed to convince him to leave this baby harp seal on the title slide:
How adorably cute is it?! Since then, we’ve had a bit of a running joke about cute baby seals, so when Kat and I made a surprise birthday cake for him, we just had to somehow include a baby seal. It took us about 3 hours to decorate, but we managed it, and I think we did quite a good job, even if I do say so myself…
What do you think? We modelled it on the harp seal pup photo from the presentation. Thankfully, Kat can draw and so she drew the outline of the seal into the icing with a toothpick (actually, I don’t have any toothpicks, so a cocktail umbrella made a wonderful substitute – we’re students, what can I say?) We made the eyes, nose and mouth with dark chocolate chips, used roughly grated white chocolate for the fur, finely grated dark chocolate for the shading and some random little square chocolate sprinkles for the eyebrows and whiskers.
Rich & decadent chocolate cake
Serves 10-12 (using a 26cm cake tin)
Recipe from Je Sais Cuisiner
This recipe can be multiplied by 1.5 and it still works fine, but has gone wrong whenever I’ve doubled it – I think there might be too many eggs or something. It’s quite a rich and compact cake, so you don’t need massive slices, and I definitely recommend serving it with whipped cream – we made kirsch-infused whipped cream (since we used kirsch in the cake) and it went rather fabulously.
Ingredients
90g all-purpose flour
140g dark chocolate (at least 70%)
140g caster sugar
70g unsalted butter
4 eggs
2 tbsp of liqueur (rum, kirsch, etc) or orange flower water
Chocolate glaçage (recipe below)
Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 120°C, and butter a 26cm round cake tin.
2. Break the chocolate into pieces and melt with the butter in a heat-proof bowl sitting over a saucepan filled with water and heated (you can also just do this in a saucepan heated over very low heat).
3. Remove from the heat and add the egg yolks one-by-one, followed by the flour and then the sugar (if you want the texture of your cake to look like the photo above, and be quite “grainy” then use a wooden spoon, but if you want it to be smoother, use a hand whisk. Both are scrumptious – it’s entirely a matter of personal taste).
4. Whisk the four egg whites up into firm peaks, and fold them into the chocolate mixture along with your chosen liqueur.
5. Pour the mixture into the buttered cake tin, and bake for about 50 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean (or a cocktail umbrella… I should really invest in some toothpicks!)
6. Invert the cake onto a cake platter or plate or whatever you want to present it on, and cover it in chocolate glaçage (see recipe below) before decorating (use white chocolate chips, hundreds and thousands, cherries, etc).
Dark chocolate glaçage
Makes enough glaçage to cover a 26cm cake (and then some!)
Recipe from Je Sais Cuisiner.
Ingredients
60g dark chocolate (at least 70%)
60g unsalted butter
2 eggs
Directions
1. Break the chocolate into pieces and melt with the butter in a heat-proof bowl sitting over a saucepan filled with water and heated (you can also just do this in a saucepan heated over very low heat).
2. Remove from the heat, and with a hand whisk, mix in each of the egg yolks. Whisk the egg whites into firm peaks and fold them into the chocolate to make a smooth mixture.
3. Spread onto the cake using a palette knife, making the top and sides as smooth as possible (don’t worry about getting chocolate all over the plate – it is fairly easy to clean up with a bit of damp kitchen roll). The glaçage will set as it cools.
Enjoy the cake with liqueur-infused whipped cream!
Sharky Oven Gloves 
Yum… with coffee ice cream perhaps? Love the seal pup, it’s adorable.
Thanks! Oh, that is also a good idea, providing the ice-cream is light as the cake is quite heavy – I hadn’t thought of that though!
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