Nutella® birthday cake - Feb 2017

There's Nutella in everything! Almost.

• It's in the sponge, Nutella added instead of vanilla
• The buttercream is Nutella
• The centre of the middle layer is nothing but ... Yep, Nutella
• The ganache is ... Hmm, I forget now ... Oh yes! I remember, Nutella
• In fact, I used approx 1.2kg of the stuff for this one cake!

However, there's no Nutella in:

• The milk chocolate flavoured fondant, that's Renshaws
• The white chocolate flavoured fondant, also Renshaws
• The jar, the Nutella it contained was used in the cake

In addition, I used the following to decorate:

• Chocolate covered popping candy
• Galaxy chocolate pieces
• Maltesers 
• Gold luster spray
• Forerro Rocher
• Kinder Bueno

If the birthday girl isn't sick of Nutella after this ... Well, I just don't know what to say

It all started with three layers of Nutella and chocolate sponge ...

The bottom layer was stuck onto the board with the Nutella frosting.

This was then topped of with a generous layer of Nutella frosting.

I used my largest, circular cookie cutter ...

... to cut a perfect hole right in the centre of the middle layer

The hole / well was lined with the buttercream ... 

... and filled with the Nutella ganache

As the middle layer has a hole in it with unset ganache, the top layer had to be frosted before it was upturned and placed on the top of the cake

The three tiers were crumb coated and chilled.

At this stage, because the ganache and frosting have not set, the layer cake was unstable, so it has to be chilled right through before it can have it's fondant coating.

This caused a little bit of a problem!

My refrigerator simply wasn't big enough to accommodate the cake - yep, I think I might have overdone it somewhat.

When the cake chilled, it was covered in milk chocolate and white chocolate marbled fondant on the sides.

The top was later covered in plain, milk chocolate fondant.

Both processes required to cake to be re-chilled and the fondant trimmed with a blade.

The board was then covered in the mixed fondants, this was mixed so it was plain and not marbled.

The Nutella was warmed slightly, in the microwave and poured, swirled, pipped and drizzled over the top of the cake.

It had to be pipped to imitate drips down the sides as it wouldn't drip by itself because it wasn't warm enough. If I had warmed it too much, it would have ruined the cake.

The cake was then embellished with hand painted letters and various other decorations (see above) then the whole cake was sprayed with gold lustre 

Since the taking photos and uploading them, the gold bling board trim has been shortened from four rows down to three.

Image credit: A Evans 2017

Thanks to the birthday girls Mum for tagging me in the video of the cutting of the cake. Here's a still. It looks even better than I imagined. Very chocolatey and utterly calorie laiden - yummmm 

Entered into the WeBake Beat the Baker Challenge