Eat With The Espinelis | 010
Tree Cake
Some of our favorite books to read as a family are the Brambly Hedge series by Jill Barklem, which is a darling and beautiful little series about a community of mice living in the English countryside. We planned for Enzo to have his own little Brambly Hedge birthday, right down to him dressing like the character in one of the stories whose birthday is being celebrated.
Since I’m still on my very long road of knee injury recovery, I had to plan and create most of it from the sofa, and Gino brought my entire vision together. A lot of this very strange time while I have been incapacitated has required constant maneuvering, restructuring, and resiliency as a family. Things like putting together a birthday celebration come with so many more challenges at this time, but what that has done is opened up a way for us to come together as a team, particularly Gino and myself. One of these things was making a cake together for Enzo that looked like a tree stump to go with the theme. I wasn’t sure at first how to go about creating the look of a tree, but it ended up working out and was a delicious recipe that we used so we wanted to share all about it and encourage you to try something new!
And in the name of resiliency, you know I’m always about using what you have, and we didn’t have powdered sugar for the buttercream, which is definitely a key component, so I went ahead and used granulated sugar. I knew it wouldn’t be the same; however, it actually added this really fun, sugary crunch that I loved! Sometimes, we just have to go with it 😉
Ingredients:
Cake
▢ 2 cups all-purpose/plain flour
▢ ¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
▢ 2 tsp baking powder
▢ 1 ½ tsp baking soda
▢ 1 tsp salt
▢ 1 ½ cups sugar
▢ 1 cup buttermilk (or 1 cup milk + 1 tsp lemon juice)
▢ ½ cup melted coconut oil
▢ 2 large eggs
▢ ¾ cup strongly brewed hot coffee or hot water
Frosting
▢ 1 ½ cup butter, softened
▢ ⅓ cup cocoa powder
▢ 3–4 cups powdered sugar
▢ ¼ cup heavy cream
Recipe:
Preheat oven to 350°F/176°C. Grease 4 six inch cake pans cake pans and/or line with parchment paper.
Add the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt to the bowl of your stand mixer (or bowl). Mix on low until all dry ingredients are evenly distributed.
Add the sugar, buttermilk, and coconut oil. Mix on low until all dry ingredients are moistened.
With the mixer still on, add the eggs in one at a time.
Carefully pour in the hot coffee/water and mix by hand until it is completely mixed into the batter (batter will be thin).
Pour evenly into pans.
Bake for 25-30 minutes. A toothpick inserted in the center should come out clean.
Allow the cakes to cool, then carefully transfer them to a cooling rack. Once they were cooled, we also sliced off the tops so that each cake was flat.
Start on frosting: Sift powdered sugar and cocoa powder together. Set aside.
Add the butter to your mixer. Mix until light and fluffy.
Add in the powdered sugar mixture ½ cup at a time. In between each sugar addition, add in a splash of heavy cream until you run out.
Keep adding powdered sugar until the desired consistency/sweetness is achieved.
To frost, we started with putting the first cake down, then some buttercream, then stacked the next cake, and another layer of buttercream, and so on. Then we did a full layer all over the top and sides. To create the look of a tree, I took a thinner cake spatula (a butter knife can be used as well) and placed it perpendicular to the cake so that the tip of the spatula is faced directly away from me, and I went one line at a time, smearing from the bottom to the top. You’ll see the layers of bark start to come together as you go one small row at a time.
We decorated it with a wildflower bunch from the local grocery store, put it on a wooden stump piece that we’ve had for years and topped it with a cake topper I found on eBay that is the character Enzo was dressed as.
We truly enjoyed putting this together, and Enzo was so excited about his cake!
*Note: For the green “moss,” we used a vanilla cake mix and, before baking, added some green food coloring. We then baked them as cupcakes to make them easier to separate for crumbling and just squished them up into smaller pieces to resemble moss!
“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”
1 Corinthians 10:31
What are some of your favorite birthday cakes to have and/or bake?
Leave your answers in the comments section!
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