A lion cake for baby boy – with coffee and hazelnuts

My cake for baby boy with coffee and hazelnuts. Being a mum of a six month old baby (and another two busy and adorable little boys) could be a challenge. Sometimes is difficult to find time for the basic household “maintenance” jobs, so a cake creation could be even more difficult activity. Especially when your baby is very active and this little attention seeker keeps you busy most of the day.
Enough to say, our baby is six months old now. So why not to make this special occasion even more memorable and bake him a cake with custom made lion cake topper? We all know, that cake with coffee and hazelnuts is not the best baby food.  Let’s be honest, the cake is usually made to decorate this event and make the whole celebration even more special. Because of the age limitations, some certain sort of food is  forbidden from of our baby’s menu. This delicious cake was made obviously for the other part of the family. I would like to now share this cake recipe with you. Hope you will like it.

Ingredients for the cake:

175 unsalted  butter
175 soft brown sugar
2 tablespoons instant espresso powder or instant coffee granules
3 eggs
225g self raising flour
150g chopped hazelnuts
2 tablespoons milk

Ingredients for the butter cream:

175g unsalted butter
250g icing sugar
2 teaspoons coffee
1 tablespoon hot water

METHOD

Pre heat the oven to 190°C. Mix the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy and beat in the melted coffee in a hot water. Slowly beat in the eggs, adding 1 tablespoon of flour if the mixture looks like curdling. Fold in the remaining flour, walnuts and milk. Spoon the mixture between the sponge cases, spreading evenly. Bake in the oven for 25 minutes or until sponges are risen and golden brown. Cool onto a wire rack to cool completely.
To make the butter cream, combine water, coffee granules in a small bowl; stir to dissolve coffee.  Set aside.
Beat the butter in a mixing bowl until soft. Mix in the icing sugar, a little at a time. Add the coffee mixture and beat on low speed to combine. Split each sponge in half  horizontally to give four thin cake layers. Sandwich the cakes together with some of the butter cream and spread a layer around the sides. Leave some butter cream for the lion’s mane.

To decorate the cake spread out the chopped walnuts on a plate, pick up the cake holding the top and bottom and roll the sides in the walnuts until coated.  Place the cake on a serving cake and spread the top with the remaining butter cream.

Finally  I removed my cake  topper from the bag and cut it out with sharp, clean, dry scissors.  Always make sure your hands are dry when handling cake toppers. Then I carefully peeled the topper away from the backing sheet and by holding the topper in both hands placed it on the cake carefully.  If any bubbles or wrinkles appeared, I gently patted them out with my finger. If your hands are warm, put a sheet of kitchen paper on top of the topper before touching it.

To finish my cake piping the lion’s mane I used my open star nozzle and remaining butter cream.