When your two year old granddaughter asks for a unicorn cake for her third birthday party, how can you say no? With a little bit of trepidation I looked on the internet and saw some amazing unicorn cakes, too complicated for me to attempt until I came across one style that didn’t look too hard. I was amazed at how easy it was and so I thought I’d share with you the simple steps of making your own unicorn cake….

It was requested that I make a chocolate cake and so again, looking on the internet I found a recipe on the Tesco website.

The quantities shown didn’t seem enough to make a cake big enough for 14 children (plus some adults) so I doubled the amount of ingredients shown.

Ingredients

220g unsalted butter, softened
220g caster sugar
200g self-raising flour
4 large eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp cocoa powder
2 tbsp milk
small pinch of salt

Method

Preheat the oven to gas 4, 180C, fan 160C. Grease and line 2 x 20cm cake tins and set aside. Beat together the butter and sugar until pale and then add all the remaining sponge ingredients and beat together until well combined. Divide the mixture between the cake tins and bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes (40 mins if using double the amount of ingredients). Once baked, cool in tins for 10 minutes and then remove and transfer to a cooling rack to cool completely.

I put the cakes into the fridge just to let them harden a little bit before I cut each cake into half. For this cake I’m just using three layers, so there was a spare layer – so what do you do with that? Easy, make it into a little cake for hubby!

The next step was to make the chocolate buttercream to go over the cake, this was quite simple:

Ingredients

200g unsalted butter
400g icing sugar
20g milk chocolate
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tbsp milk

You can either melt the chocolate in a bowl over a saucepan of boiling water or put it in the microwave for 30 second bursts until melted.

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl until the mixture is smooth.

Buttercream the layers of the cake and also the outside of the cake and then put it in the fridge to harden.

The easiest way to cover the cake is to buy the ready rolled sugarpaste – it is a bit thick, so I used a rolling pin to make it thinner.

The next step was the fun part – decorating it. I made some eyes out of sugarpaste, basically cutting out circles and small hearts for the pupils and then making some eyelashes.

I bought the unicorn horn and ears from Amazon and the pop-dots from our local Co-Op. I coloured some buttercream pink and piped the mane, decorating it with Love Hearts, marshmallows and unicorn sprinkles I found in Tesco’s.

So, there you have it – an easy Unicorn cake and I have to say, my granddaughter loved it!!