Rocky Road Easter Cake

Rocky Road Easter Cake. Photo: SimoneySunday

My hubby is not a great fan of chocolate eggs or bunnies. Nor does he rave over marzipan and dried fruit, which means making him Easter eggs and Simnel cakes, while ostensibly appreciated, is futile (I have to eat them myself).

Therefore as he does love eating chocolates and chocolate cakes that are stuffed full with bits, such as brownie squares, cookies and fridge squares, I decided this year to make him a Rocky Road Easter cake. The question was, how should this best be done to look professional enough as a gift?

I did have a round cake mould, plenty of chocolate and plenty of digestives. I always keep stacks of chocolate and digestive biscuits for baking, as well as marshmallows for entertaining the youth group. Sure enough I also had glacé cherries in my cupboard so I set about my fiendish plan.

Preparation time: 30m
Keeps: two weeks in a cool, dry and sealed environment.
Serves: 12 easily, 14 if you are stingy. 2 if you are dedicated to eating it every day for two weeks.

Ingredients
Chocolate (I used Sainsbury's Basics range of chocolate bars, three dark and three milk. This came to about £2.10 worth of chocolate)
1 bag large marshmallows
Half a tub of glace cherries
1 pack of Basics digestive biscuits
1 pack Sainsbury's white chocolate
Various leftover icing decorations from the previous Easter (they keep mostly forever)
A cake mould (ring looks cool but I am sure you could do this with a loaf tin)

How to
I melted all the milk and dark chocolate in a large saucepan on the lowest possible heat.
Once the chocolate was stirred and melted the pot was removed from the heat and I then mashed nearly all the digestives into it using the end of a rounded rolling pin.
Some biscuits fell into my mouth by accident. It was great.
Don't mash the digestives up too much - leave some fairly chunky to give texture and crunch to the finished product.
Cut each cherry into half and stir into the mix.
Cut the marshmallows up (if they are large) into quarters. I found that I had to keep bathing the knife in warm water as it was getting sticky, so I gave up, washed my hands and tore the marshmallows up myself. Some may have fallen into my mouth by accident. I plead the fifth.
Stir the marshmallows into the mix.

Once it is all stirred, spoon into your cake mould. I should have put greaseproof paper in first but I didn't.

Leave to set in the fridge overnight.

Now the next day, if you have sensibly used greaseproof, simply lift it out of the mould. If you didn't, then like me you will have to warm it up a tiny, tiny bit so it melts enough to slide out without being a mess. To do this i left it sitting in a bowl of warm water for five minutes.

Once it is out and on a plate, decorate with melted white chocolate. I drizzled this over using a honey stirrer, from a fair height, and then dotted last year's sugar icing decorations around it in a fairly even pattern, and left it to set.

For the finishing touches, I wrapped it in clear polythene. I had bought a huge roll of this years ago from Woolworths for sweets I was making to put into little teacups for beautiful, unusual birthday presents (I will hunt for pictures and write up the recipe soon) and I still have plenty of this left.

Ready for Easter Morning. Photo credit: Simoney Sunday

A tiny scroll of shiny gold ribbon, an Easter verse from the Bible and some colourful Easter paper cut-outs and voila! A professional looking Easter Rocky Road cake.

And it was delicious.