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Piñata Cake

Yummy cake with a hidden surprise!

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It’s been a while since my last blog post, I’d love to tell you it’s because I’ve been super busy but really I’m just lazy. I’m currently in Atlanta celebrating the holiday season. I celebrated my first Thanskgiving this year, it was a lot of fun, you can’t beat a holiday where all you do is eat! I made my Sweet Potato & Cider Cupcakes with Marshmallow Frosting for the occasion. Anyway, back to the task at hand.

My nephew’s 6th birthday was coming up so naturally I planned to make him a cake. He loves Mario so I went with a Mario world themed base and a coin block on top. As it’s a coin block there has to be coins inside, and so I made my first piñata cake! It’s a simple thing to do but looks really impressive when you cut into the cake. Kids will love it too of course. In this blog post I’ll show the method I used, so there are no recipes in this post. I plan to share my Chocolate Mojito Swiss Roll recipe soon (I just need to go through it again as I didn’t write it down the first time, oops) so look out for that, it’s a good one!

This method will work with most cakes. This one is a cube of course, but it’ll work with a standard round cake too (or any shape if you’re committed enough!). The first thing to do is bake your cake layers, you want the cake to be tall enough to be able to have a good sized centre for the sweets/chocolates, my cake had three layers so I’ll be basing this tutorial off of that. Once your layers are baked and cooled, cut a circle out of the centre of one layer and then circles out of half the other two layers. Feel free to eat the cut offs, you deserve it!

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For the centre layer, you want the hole to go all the way through

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For the top and bottom layer, you don’t want the hole to go all the way through

Now it’s time to fill and build it. Frost the bottom layer, being careful to avoid the hole cut out, then place the centre layer on top

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Fill the whole with your chosen sweets. Mine was filled with chocolate coins and smarties.

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Frost/fill that top layer, again avoiding the hole and top up with more sweets

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Add the top layer and you have your base for your fancy piñata cake.

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It looks like just a normal cake, but you know the secret inside!

Now crumb coat and frost/cover your cake as you would normally. Present your cake and accept all the praise you get for how impressive and clever you are!

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The finished cake! As you can see, my cake decorating skills still need some work but I’m getting better!

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The birthday boy and his cake!

Of course with a piñata you’re supposed to whack it with a stick to get the sweets inside. I wouldn’t recommend that with a cake, unless you cover the room with plastic first haha!