Angry birds chocolate cake

Last week my friend Carmen asked me to make an angry birds cake for her nephew's birthday. He loves the game and she wanted to surprise him. I was delighted. Angry birds cakes are so cool!! 
That is why we will have to postpone the wedding cake I was planning to make. No time for everything! 
To make this cake you will need a madeira sponge cake, tons of chocolate and a great amount of fondant with incredibly high doses of patience.

This kind of cakes which are covered with fondant and have decorations of sugar on the top or the edges need to be quite tall to support the weight we are putting on them. The height is one of the reasons the portions we get from them are smaller than in a regular cake. Another reason is the amount of sugar we get in each piece and the strong consistency of the cake. This cakes can be filled with almost anything. The most common filling is buttercream, remember we can get buttercream with a great range of different flavours. But we can also use ganache, marmalade, cream...anything you can think of!!
The birthday boy loves dark chocolate so this cake will have a dark chocolate ganache filling.

Ingredients for a 18cm cake (10 portions):

300g of butter
300g of sugar
400g of all-purpose flour
6 eggs
2 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder

We sift the flour and the baking powder and we reserve.
We put the sugar and the butter in a bowl and we mix until we get a smooth dough. We add the eggs one by one while we whisk. 
We add the flour to the mix but not all at once. We add it with a spoon while we keep beating until all the ingredients are well integrated.
We pour it in our mould and we put it in the oven at 160 for 70 minutes. We can check if it is ready sticking a barbecue stick in the middle. If it comes out clean our cake is done.

Dark chocolate ganache
Ingredients
300gr of dark chocolate (around 70% cocoa)
300ml of cream (40% fat)
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract (optional)

It is really simple to make. We heat the cream until it starts to boil and we remove it from heat. We add the chocolate in small pieces while we keep stirring up and all the pieces are melt. If we want we can add the vanilla extract now. We will get a nice and bright dark chocolate cream. We let it cool and we put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. 

Once we have the cake ready we can start filling it. We take out the ganache a half an hour before we start working with it. We cut the top of the cake with a cake leveler or a large bread knife so we get a nice straight top. Now we cut the cake again to put our filling in. I always put two layers of filling so it is more tasty. As this cakes are quite dense we can also add some vanilla syrup before we spread the ganache. Once it is filled we need to cover the whole cake with a layer of ganache so our fondant sticks to the cake. Something like this.

Now it is time to roll out the fondant. We do not want to make it too thin because it will break as we cover the cake. We will make sure we have around a 5 mm thickness. 

Now all you need to do is choose the colours you will need for your decorations and start modelling with patience and time.

             
                                                                       

Marcos was the happiest birthday boy ever!!!