Honeycomb Crunch Chocolate Cake

One day last week I was scrolling through Instagram and I stumbled across a recipe for a Honeycomb Crunch Chocolate Cake and it looked amazing so I had to give it a go myself. I mean, who doesn’t love a bit of honeycomb?

I was taken back by the measurements in the recipe as the majority of everything was measured in “cups”, which I had never used before so it was definitely something new for me!

Ingredients:

For the cake:

• 3/4 cups of Guinness or any other stout
• 1/4 cup of strong black coffee
• 1 cup/250g unsalted butter
• 3/4 cup of unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 cups of plain flour
• 2 cups of sugar (I used caster sugar)
• 1/2 tablespoon of baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoons of salt
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract
• 2/3 cups of creme fraiche or sour cream

For the salted caramel buttercream

• 300g of butter, softened
• 397g of Carnation caramel or dulce de leche
• pinch of Maldon salt (I didn’t use this)
• 50g of crushed honeycomb (I used crushed Crunchie bars as I couldn’t find any honeycomb in the local supermarkets)

For the chocolate ganache

• 1 cup of whipping cream or double cream
• 1/2 pound of dark chocolate, chopped

For decoration

• a handful of honeycomb pieces
• a pinch on Maldon salt (I didn’t use this)

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 350F/180C and butter 3 8inch cake tins and dust them with a little bit of flour so the mixture does not stick to the cakes.
2. In a large saucepan, heat the stout, coffee and butter together until the mixture comes to a gentle simmer.
3. Add cocoa powder whilst whisking continuously to avoid any lumps until smooth. Set aside to cool.
4. Blend flour, sugar, baking soda and salt in a different bowl. Mix eggs, vanilla extract and creme fraiche with an electric mixer in bowl no 3.
5. Now check on your chocolate mixture and make sure it’s cook enough to continue with the process – I waited about half an hour just to be safe.
6. Add the chocolate mixture to the egg and creme fraiche mixture and blend them together. Add the flour mixture a little bit at a time and beat on a low-speed until combined. Divide the batter equally among the 3 tins.
7. Bake the cakes in the preheated over for 30 minutes. In the recipe it states to bake them one at a time, but I just whacked them all in the oven at the same time.
8. Remove the cakes from the oven and cool on a wire rack.
9. Make the salted caramel buttercream by whipping butter in a bowl of a stand mixer until light and fluffy and then adding the prepared caramel or dulce de leche with a pinch of flaky salt until completely incorporated – if you don’t have a stand mixer, I just used a normal electric mixer.
10. Wrap the honeycomb pieces in a clean towel and crush them using a rolling-pin or in a food processor.
11. Once the cakes are cool, level them off so your cake doesn’t look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Fill the cake layers with the salted caramel buttercream. Add the crushed honeycomb to the leftover buttercream, and then cover the rest of the cake. Once everything is covered, place in the fridge to chill for 30-40 minutes.
12. Meanwhile, make a chocolate ganache. Bring heavy cream to the boil and take it off immediately. Add your chopped chocolate and stir until it is completely melted. Leave it to cool for a bit and then whip it using an electric mixer until it is paler in colour and fluffy.
13. Cover the chilled cake with chocolate ganache and decorate with some leftover honeycomb pieces.

(Please ignore the messy bits at the bottom)

As you can tell from the recipe, this cake is extremely high on the calorie count! When cutting the cake, I highly recommend only cutting a small slice as it is quite a thick and dense mixture and I imagine it to be quite sickly if you eat a large slice. It is so tasty and it’s making me hungry just from writing up the recipe!

Love,
Emily xo