You don’t need to be any good at cake decorating to make these really impressive birthday number cakes. Even if you have never iced a cake before I’m going to show you have to make a birthday cake that will delight your kids and impress your party guests.
Ingredients
- 4 Eggs £0.78
- 1 Teaspoon Baking Powder £0.10
- 225g Self Raising Flour £0.15
- 225g Caster Sugar £0.34
- 425g Butter (225g for cake 200g for frosting) £3.38
- Cocoa Powder £0.30
- 400g Icing Sugar £0.89
- Smarties x 3 Bags £3.57
- Chocolate Fingers x 6 Packs £5.94
Total = £15.45
Makes 30 servings = 52p per serving
Food purchased from Aldi. Prices correct at time of publishing.
How to Make a Birthday Number Cake
When my kids first started having birthday parties I treated them to one of these cake tin sets.
It’s a large rectangular cake tin with inserts that you add and rearrange according to the number you want. There’s easy to follow diagrams included in the instructions so you don’t have to figure out what to put where.
It just takes a minute or two to set up the pan. Then you need to grease it really well – I like to use margarine or spray oil if I have some handy.
Then simply pour in the cake mixture (I’m sharing my recipe for that further down this blog post) and cook it like you would any other cake.
Once the cake has cooled you can decorate it however you like.
The great thing about these number (or letter) cakes is that you don’t need to be any good at cake decorating to create a really impressive cake. I usually just slap some buttercream frosting on and call it good. One year I covered the top in sprinkles which looked great. Another year I used green frosting and added some cheap dinosaur toys, it looked amazing!
This year my Little Dude asked for a rainbow cake with smarties.
I made some chocolate flavoured buttercream frosting and smothered it over the cake. Before the frosting set I gently pushed about a million smarties into the top surface of the cake. So Many smarties!!!
Then I stuck chocolate fingers around the edges of the entire cake. Oh wow, this took so many chocolate fingers I really should have bought twice as many!
Because all the surfaces of the cake are covered with sweets and chocolates you really can’t see how terrible I am at icing!!
How to Make a Chocolate Cake
If you can get your butter down to room temperature before you start baking.
Start by weighing out the butter, sugar, baking powder and flour into a mixing bowl.
Add the eggs and mix it really well. A stand mixer makes light work of this.
Sprinkle in some cocoa powder and mix it in.
Arrange the cake tin and grease it really well with butter, margarine or spray oil. Make sure you get all the sides really well greased.
Pour the mixture into the cake tin.
Pop the your cake into your oven set at gas mark 4.
You need to cook the cake until you can insert a skewer (or a fork) into the centre of the cake and bring it out looking clean. I usually set an alarm to check the cake after 30 minutes.
Once the cake is cooked leave it to cool completely before decorating.
For the frosting mix the remaining 200g of butter with 400g of icing sugar, along with a sprinkling of cocoa powder.
Spread the frosting onto the cake with a spatula.
Once you’ve finished decorating the cake pop it in the fridge for a few hours to set the frosting.
I do hope that my Chocolate Cake recipe has inspired you to have a go at making your own easy kids birthday cakes.
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Pin this Chocolate Cake recipe to your Pinterest board so you can find it when you need a fun and easy birthday cake recipe.
A Little Bit About Me . . .
Thank you so much for stopping by my little corner of the interweb. I’m Bridie, mum to two small humans, full time homemaker and full time craftaholic – which totally explains why I’m always short on time!
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Heart and Hearth Crafts 