Chocolate Fudge cake..and a very very special 1st birthday :-)

A couple of months back we celebrated my baby boy's first birthday! 

The last year since we welcomed him in to our lives has been the quickest, most amazing time of our lives. 

All thanks to God for granting my family with such an amazing blessing.  Every moment of mine is filled with happiness and complete amazement at how such a little human being is growing right in front of our eyes.  Along with his development and curiosity comes a lot of crashes and bangs and mess and fun. 

Alhamdulillah I can not thank God enough! For his birthday we chose to invite family over and spend the day enjoying each other's company and showering our Snugglebug with lots of love (and gifts!). 

Since I am absolutely rubbish at decorating cakes, the task of creating him a birthday cake that was decent to look at was quite daunting.

Usually all I care about is the taste, but this time it had to look special and I had to make it myself! I contemplated different shaped cakes, from a dinosaur to Elmo but at the end I decided I wanted to enjoy making a cake that is me and that everyone will enjoy eating. Luckily for me all our family are chocoholics which made the entire task so much easier :-)

I decided on a deep, fudgey, ultra chocolatey cake covered in chocolate ganache and surrounded with chocolate fingers. I also loaded the top with Maltesers and chocolate buttons. The colour theme for the party was brown, blue and green so I just added some M&Ms for a pop of colour. This was the final result and I was very pleased with it :-) 

I then topped it with a matching topper that I designed and a blue star candle. All Done!! Yay!!

Ooey Gooey Fudgey Chocolatey goodness!! :-)

By the end of the day we all were on a chocolate high including Snugglebug who had free reign since it was his birthday! The recipe for the cake was the fudge cake that my mum used to make when we were kids and brought back so many beautiful memories. That's what food does. It brings back the fondest of memories of us spending time around the table with our families and as children. I'm going to keep making this cake for my baby boy as he grows so he can create memories of it as he grows just as I did! :-)

Ingredients:

4 eggs

3 level cups granulated sugar

3 cups plain yogurt

3 and a half cups plain flour

2 tsp salt

2 and a half tsps bicarbonate of soda

1 cup cocoa

8oz butter/margarine

2 tsps vanilla essence

Place all the ingredients in to a large mixing bowl and mix together with a hand held mixer.

Bake on 180 degrees for about 40 minutes. It depends on your oven. Be very sure to remove the cakes just as soon as they are done or they will become dry and cake rather than fudge and yum.

Enjoy :-)

-S