Baking for Beginners: Millionaire's Mud Cake

There's plain old shortbread, and then there's millionaire's shortbread. Adding caramel somehow makes it ten times better and worthy of a snazzy title.

I decided to give Mud Cake the same makeover. Not to say Mud Cake isn't decadent, but this one goes one sweet step further. It's a caramel white chocolate mud cake from heaven. Ultra sweet and moist, with a molasses hit from the muscavado sugar. The ganache covering is sticky and golden, and tastes a bit like Caramac (remember Caramac?!).

I took my inspiration from Aussie blogger Almost Bourdain's Caramel Mud Cake, who makes a lovely refined cake simply dusted with icing sugar. I tweaked it, simplified it (who wants to faff around with plain flour AND self raising in the same recipe?) and added lashings of sumptuous white chocolate caramel ganache. And then I went nuts and topped it with white chocolate Maltesers, but this part is optional.

The ganache is very sticky, so if you're clumsy or you're pedantic about crumbs in your icing, I'd recommend you double the frosting recipe so you can do two layers.

Who wants to be a millionaire? Me, if you get cake like this.

You'll need:

For the cake

• 200g white chocolate
• 200g dark brown muscavado sugar
• 200g butter
  
• 200ml full fat milk
• 1tbsp golden syrup
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 2 medium eggs
• 300g plain flour
• 2tsp baking powder

For the ganache frosting

• 75g caster sugar
• 200ml double cream
• 200g white chocolate

Make it!


The cake

• Preheat the oven to 180c/160c fan/Gas 4.
• Grease and line a 23cm round or 20cm square tin. Don't skip this step as the mixture is quite sticky and you'll never get it out of the tin.
• Melt together the chocolate, butter, sugar, milk, syrup and vanilla in a saucepan over a low heat. Keep stirring until it's nice and smooth, then leave it until it's at room temperature.
• Lightly beat the eggs, then stir into the chocolate mixture. Don't do this too soon, or you'll end up with a horrible scrambled egg & chocolate mess.
• Sift the flour and baking powder into the mixture and stir in until you have a smooth batter.
• Bake for 1 hour, or until the cake is fully cooked and a cocktail stick poked into the middle comes out clean.
• Leave it to cool in the tin for 15 minutes or so, before turning it out on a rack.

The frosting

• Put the caster sugar into a large, heavy bottomed saucepan over a medium heat. Try to get it in an even layer and let it completely melt and caramelise without stirring. If you need to, you can swirl it around the pan, but DO NOT STIR! It should be a kind of rusty colour.
• While this is happening, break up the chocolate into a large bowl and bring the cream and salt to the boil in another pan. Keep one eye on the caramel.
• Once the caramel is ready, pour in the cream. It might spit, so stand back. Give it a stir.
• Pour the hot caramel mixture over the chocolate and beat it with a wooden spoon until smooth. Leave to cool before frosting the cake.