Chocolate Fingers and Smarties Birthday Cake

Oh, how I wish I'd got a better picture of the cake - sorry!

This week it was Maisie's 4th birthday. We had the smallest celebration at home with just her best friend and her Mummy - it was really lovely!

As it was such a small, informal affair I wanted to make a cake that was small, low effort but high impact. My daughter is one of the fussiest eaters I know, (we have to take a packed lunch to parties now as there's rarely anything she will eat!) but she will eat chocolate fingers and Smarties. She's never eaten birthday cake, so I thought I'd layer it with a tier of chocolate chip muffins just in case.

My inspiration for the cake was this one -

A Kit Kat cake filled with M&Ms... I do feel that the finish of Kit Kats is much neater than chocolate fingers but Maisie won't eat Kit Kats and I just prefer the colour and taste of Smarties.

It's pretty straightforward to make - although mine was even simpler than the instructions for the one above.

Make a 6 inch Madeira cake.
Leave to cool.
Level the top.
Cut in half and fill with buttercream and jam.
Melt about 60grams of chocolate.
Spread the melted chocolate on the bottom half of the chocolate fingers with a knife and 'stick' them, one by one, around the cake. I used 2 small packets.
Spread a thin layer of melted chocolate on the top.
Fill the top with Smarties before serving.
Tie with a cute ribbon bow. (About 1 and a half metres.)

Easy!

I bought these silicone cupcake cases from Amazon and the colours matched beautifully with the colour of the Smarties -

Last year I made a sign for the top of Maisie's birthday cake out of silver plated wire, Swarovski crystals and shrink plastic. So this year, all I had to do was change the 3 to a 4. Luckily, the colours of my Sakura pens that I coloured the shrink plastic with matched beautifully with my cupcake cases and Smarties - you'd think I'd planned it!