Honeycomb Crunch Chocolate Cake

Name: Honeycomb Crunch Chocolate Cake
Prep time: 60 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 90 min
Yield: 8 -10
Ingredients: 3/4 cup Guinness or any other stout; 1/4 cup strong black coffee; 1 cup/ 250 gr unsalted butter; 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder; 2 cups all purpose flour; 2 cups sugar; 1/2 tablespoon baking soda; 3/4 teaspoons salt; 2 large eggs; 2 tsp pure vanilla extract; 2/3 cups creme fraiche or sour cream; 300 gr butter (softened); 397 gr Carnation caramel or dulce de leche; pinch of Maldon salt; 50 gr crushed honeycomb; 1 cup whipping cream/double cream; 1/2 pound dark chocolate (chopped); a handful of honeycomb pieces; a pinch of Maldon salt

This decadent chocolate cake is so luxuriously beautiful and delicious, you will feel like it came from a French patisserie!

It’s been a while since I made a proper layer cake…10 months to be exact. I couldn’t believe that the last cake I made was last Christmas/my birthday. It’s very unlike me, but to be perfectly honest this year has carried many ups and downs so I’ve rarely been in the mood.

It started with a with a family tragedy we are still recovering from, so celebrating wasn’t often on our minds. As the year picked up I plunged myself into work and got so busy learning a new job I barely had time to cook let alone bake a multi-layered cake.

But this week has marked the end of something great, something I am proud of and although there is no actual “occasion” – something I can announce to the world – in my heart I know it’s worth acknowledging.

I felt like sometimes you just gotta stop in your tracks in celebrate the moment as someone very wise once said, “We have to celebrate things that are meaningful to us”.

So I spent the day baking this chocolate cake and then another day putting it together. It was a labour of love just like what I’ve been doing for the last 8 months, and just like that it made me feel tired but very accomplished. 🙂 In other words, it was well worth it.

I know I mentioned before it’s incredibly hard for me to choose what cake to make – there are so many options but because this cake was special I wanted it to be about all of our favourite things.

I asked Brad what he loved to eat in a cake and he listed chocolate, caramel and something crunchy. They say all happy couples eventually morph into one, which is apparently true as those things were exactly what I wanted in MY cake.

I started by making a chocolate stout cake, one of my favourite cake recipes. It produces dense chocolate sponge that stands up well to the rich caramel frosting.

The filling for this chocolate cake comes from my childhood, something every Russian child grew up with-caramel buttercream. A pinch of flaky Maldon salt gave it a modern update.

The much desired crunch came from crushed honeycomb pieces, which are hard caramel bits, folded into caramel buttercream.

Then I covered the entire chocolate cake into dark chocolate ganache and sprinkled with more honeycomb and salt flakes.

If honeycomb candy is not available in your supermarkets feel free to use Butterfinger bars, although not exactly the same they will be a fair substitute.

Here’s the recipe for homemade caramel or dulce de leche:

* Remove the label from the can of sweet and condensed milk and put it in the pot completely submerged in water. Bring to a boil and continue cooking for 3-4 hours. Make sure your can is completely covered in water through the duration of cooking or it will explode. Cool until it’s ready to use. When you open it you will discover that your “ole” plain can of sweet and condensed milk got transformed into glamorous and silky dulce de leche.

The stages of making salted caramel buttercream for the chocolate cake: