Chocolate Cricket Pitch Cake

March and April seem to be busy months for birthdays in our families and the next one is tomorrow. Since we have to be at work tomorrow, we celebrated today. The birthday, of course, demanded a cake (or to be honest, it was more of an excuse for me to bake). A chocolate cake was decided upon and this presented the perfect opportunity to try out the new ready-to-roll chocolate icing, which I was quite excited about! I was going to add a white icing 'ribbon' to make the cake look like a birthday present but somehow the idea came about to make the top of the cake look like a cricket pitch (I think my other half might have suggested it). The birthday in question was that of my other half's Dad who is quite the cricket fan and so it seemed like a good idea to me. I spent a while trying to decide exactly how to decorate it and this is what I ended up with:

I do realise that it's in no way to scale, but then again, it is a cake! The wicket is made of marzipan, as is the wooden part of the bat. The handle and the ball are made from red sugarpaste icing and the stumps are match sticks. I did consider using candles as stumps but decided that they would be far too big, even for my not-to-scale cake! I then used a small amount of marzipan to make the bails. For the boundary rope and crease markings I used a white chocolate squeezy icing pen.

For the cake itself I used a chocolate cake recipe from BBC Food, http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/easy_chocolate_cake_31070 though I used buttercream icing instead of the icing recipe suggested here since I was using regalice icing on top. 

The ready-to-roll chocolate icing looked good on the chocolate cake but wasn't as tasty as I'd hoped. It was perfectly fine but I was hoping that it would taste a little more chocolatey than it did. That said, I would still use it again. It gives a nice finish to a chocolate cake and I feel it suits it a little more than any other sort of sugarpaste icing. I think the next step would be to try making my own sugarpaste and see whether I could make it more chocolately.

The chocolate cake itself was extremely easy to make. The recipe produced a very moist and quite rich cake which tasted lovely, but I think eating it straight after dinner was maybe a little too much! My other half declared the cake a success though (and it seemed to go down well in general) so I'll use the recipe again - next time I'll be having it with a cup of tea as an afternoon snack though!