How to decorate your New Year's Eve cake

I'm not sure where I got the idea to turn a normal chocolate mud cake into something more boozy with the edition of mulled wine, but it has been floating around in my head for a while now! So I decided to give it a whirl for New Year's Eve and, even if  I to say so myself, it is a triumph, the wine isn't too overpowering and the boozy sultanas are deliciously squidgy. 

Mulled wine chocolate mud cake

Ingredients

Mulled wine:

• 600ml red wine
• 100g sugar
• 60g sultanas
• 6 cardamon pods
• 6 cloves
• 1 stick cinnamon
• freshly squeezed juice of an orange

Cake:

• 230g good quality dark chocolate
• 150g unsalted butter
• 400 ml mulled wine
• 2 large eggs
• 160g sugar
• 260g self raising flour

Ganache:

• 200ml mulled wine
• 400g good quality dark chocolate

Method:

• Add all the mulled wine ingredients into a saucepan and gently simmer for 30 mins. Strain the wine keeping the sultanas but discarding the cloves, cardamons and cinnamon.
• Grease and line a 7" cake tin.
• Preheat the oven to 170C/325F
• Place 400ml of the mulled wine, the chocolate and the butter into a saucepan and gently heat until the chocolate and butter have melted. Leave to cool slightly.
• In a bowl lightly beat the eggs, slowly add the melted chocolate mixture beating well.
• Beat in the flour and sugar.
• Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 40-45 mins until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin.
• Melt the chocolate and beat it as you slowly pour in the wine, (which should also be hot.) Beat until they are combined.
• Take half the ganache and stir in the sultanas.
• Cut the cake in half and pour over the ganache with the sultanas. Put it into the fridge to harden.
• Place the other half of the cake on top (I turn the cake upside down so the top becomes the bottom as you may find it cracks a little) and pour over the rest of the ganache.
• Decorate by splashing the cake with edible gold paint.

I wanted to decorate the cake in quite a simple manner, as you want to be able to spend most of the day primping and preening yourself and not a cake. Fortunately I always have some spare cookie dough in the freezer, so I decided to use that rather than messing about with fondant. You will need to use a fairly stiff dough so that it keeps it shape, of course you could spell out the new date rather than a countdown, or even make a Valentine's Day version with your initials.

Decorating

I hope you have a lovely celebration tonight and that there is a wonderful, cake filled year to come for you.

You can download a pdf of the recipe here.

xxx