Christmas Tree Cake

On Sunday we had an amazing Uni Christmas between our two houses. It started off very civilised and adult, until the twenty odd bottles of wine kicked in and the Twister mat came out…It was one of the best Christmas things ever though, and I love all of my Telephone homies very much.

Since we’re all sane, and therefore none of us like Christmas pudding/cake/other gross Christmas puddings, I thought I’d just make a massive tree cake instead. I bought these disposable paper moulds but I know you can buy metal ones if you feel like tree cakes is something you’re going to do a lot of. I originally wanted the actual cake to be green but what you really need is the expensive gel colouring to achieve that effect. Sadly, I am poor, so ASDA colouring was all I could afford, so the cake just has an odd green tinge…

Ingredients

6 eggs

14oz self –raising flour

14oz caster sugar

14oz butter

3tsps baking powder

Green colouring

To decorate

Butter

Icing sugar

Green and red colouring

Glitter, baubles etc.

First of all, this 6 egg recipe made an absolute monster amount of batter so I ended up with an extra 12 cupcakes alongside the cake.

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C. Lightly grease your tree mould.

In a large mixing bowl combine all the ingredients until smooth.

Pour the mixture into the mould, making sure it squishes right into all the corners and is evenly spread out. The fatter you make the cake, the longer it will take to cook, so be prepared!

Bake until golden brown on top, and a skewer when inserted comes out clean. I filled the mould about ¾ of the way through and it took a good hour to bake. If it looks like it’s starting to burn on top then pop a bit of brown paper over the cake and it will continue to bake without burning.

Leave to cool on a wire rack while you make the icing.

In a bowl cream a large amount of butter. Sift Icing sugar and milk if you need to until there is a decent amount of icing. Separate a few spoonfuls of icing into two separate bowls. Leave one white, and add some red colouring to the other. In the main bowl add the green colouring.

Cover the whole cake in green, and then drag a fork over it in zigzags to give it the pine needle effect. Use a piping bag to pipe the white and red icing as tinsel. Add edible decorations all over and finally finish with a good sprinkling of edible glitter.

CHRISTMAS CAKE! :D

P.S. All my work in now officially handed in, so watch this space for a flurry of recipes as I have nothing better to do with my Christmas now other than baking.