Birthday Banoffee Cake

My absolute favourite type cake has to be anything along the lines of gooey chocolatey fudgey goodness, so chocolate cake is always my go to for people's birthdays. After all, who doesn't like chocolate?! My boyfriend it turns out.

After being requested to make a "different" cake for Mr R's birthday that didn't fall under my trusty chocolate category, I was a little bit stumped. But after much research on Pinterest, and the knowledge that his favourite dessert is banoffee pie, I decided to do a bit of a twist. Et voila, we have the banoffee cake! All the bests bit of the traditional dessert, with added cakey spongey goodness. Yum!

I decided to follow this recipe for the sponge of the cake as I love the combination of banana and cinnamon flavours. However, even though I'm a huge fan of marshmallows, I felt that for this cake it may have been a bit too sweet, so instead decided to use the caramel frosting and caramel sauce from this recipe. I then chose to decorate the cake using dried banana slices and a statement pile of chocolate curls, inspired by this banoffee pie. 

This cake was really all about experimenting for me as I was using techniques that I had never tried before. It was a step into the unknown but was definitely worth it! I loved the effect of the dark chocolate curls, and they had the benefit of being surprisingly easy to make! I followed this video for step by step instructions, but instead swapped the chocolate chips with a 100g bar of dark chocolate (leaving more than enough to sneakily eat out the bowl). I had also never made caramel before, but again it turned out to be very easy. And my God was it good. Again, I *accidently* made too much so of course had to eat the rest (even if it did make me feel a bit sick by the end).

Despite over baking it a little bit, I am so proud of this cake. Not only did it taste good, but I love the look of it and had so much fun learning some new techniques. I'm definitely going to be a lot more adventurous and experimental with my future bakes!  

Happy baking :)

Love, Beth xxx