Easy Cake Decorating: Chocolate Overload

This is a win-win cake; super easy to do, and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn't like it (I've heard that some people don't like chocolate but refuse to believe it - how can this be true???). The first part is perfect for me, since I've been alternately under the weather and super busy for the last month (sorry about the lack of posts!). Hopefully I'm done with being unwell and swollen-jawed for a while but the busy-ness doesn't look like it's letting up - actually what I usually do at this time of year is try to squeeze yet more into the days, since there's extra daylight. Unfortunately since I'm not afraid of the dark and most of my activities aren't reliant on daylight this logic is a little flawed... But hey, it's good to be motivated, right?

Last weekend was Baby Sister Cake's 21st, so I was down in Christchurch with all the family - fun but manic! Because my other sister and I had decided to take the birthday girl on a big shopping mission for a party outfit as her present I didn't have a whole lot of cake decorating time up my sleeve. I was planning to do something more elaborate with fondant but knew I'd probably be short on time, and as we were waiting for our flight on Friday night I mentioned to Mr Cake that I had this in mind as a back-up plan, in case the shopping ran overtime. He said "That sounds cool. You should just do that anyway." So I did.

I had premade the cake and ganache - any kind of cake/icing combination will do, though chocolate is naturally the best. ;-) I used chocolate mud cake, and had made a gargantuan two-layer version (1kg each of chocolate and butter!). However, I must warn you about the down side of this cake - it is not cheap, and the smaller the cake you make the less of the costly 'decorations' you'll need.

Once you have your cake all iced up, it's as simple as this; cover it with chocolate bars!

And with a little more detail: I used flakes around the outside, and broke each one in half with my fingers (cutting made the edges funny) before sticking them on. I used 24(!) Flakes (it pays to get the chocolate on special!). To decorate the top, I first stuck in the candles at random angles (much easier to do this at the beginning!) then cut Crunchie, Pinky, Bubbles, Kit Kat and Moro bars into rough chunks and broke up some Maltesers. With not a great deal of science I mixed these up, scattered them over the cake and sprinkled M&Ms over the top. And there we have it!

I chose my chocolate bars based on colour - the chocolate might all be brown but the different fillings make for better eye candy (groan). I used about two of each chocolate bar for toppings, but this is a gargantuan cake - 30cm in diameter - so you could probably get away with less. However, a recommendation from one who is all too familiar with last minute cake decorating disasters - get more chocolate than you think you need if time is not on your side. Having a few extra chocolate bars to stash away for a rainy day is vastly preferable to running out!

The party was great fun - the theme was basically all the birthday girl's childhood toys, so we had rooms full of big kids (and a few little ones) playing with Duplo trains and colouring in. How did you celebrate your 21st?