Allotment cake for the boss

After my disparaging comments about cupcakes, you might be surprised to discover I do quite like decorating cakes. But the foundations have to be good - it needs to be a good cake, or you're just putting lipstick on a pig.

The birthday of my boss was approaching, and she is lovely and has had a lot to put up with so far this year with me arriving last April and then abandoning her for nine weeks when I got ill. I don't know much about her other than she has chickens and an allotment and loves white chocolate, so a cake seemed the obvious choice.

The cake itself is this Ultimate Chocolate Cake from the BBC Good Food website, my go to site when I'm looking for inspiration. I tend to mix up the recipes, so although the cake is from there and I did make the chocolate ganache, I also made a white chocolate buttercream from one of the Bake Off contestant's books. I can't remember if it was Ed Kimber or the one who won last year but it was quite simple, just normal buttercream with melted white chocolate in it, which I then coloured green for grass. Colouring this was my first experience of using powdered colouring because I didn't want the flavour of the liquid one, and it was quite hard to get the right colour. I'll try gel next time. This was also the first time I used the grass nozzle, and in classic codging style, decided to just go for it without practising first. Maybe some time and practise would have been better, but my boss loved it and the cake tasted amazing although incredibly rich.



One of my friends, knowing the time and effort that had gone in, told me it was 'not bad for a first attempt, but quite brown.' He thought the chickens should have been yellow. Have you ever seen a real yellow chicken? I'm currently not speaking to him. ;-)