Chocolate Hazelnut (Ferrero Rocher!) Birthday Cake

Ooooh this is SUCH A GOOD ONE.

Roll up, roll up for the best chocolate cake you'll ever eat. I have a particular love for chocolate and hazelnut, praline, Nutella, whatever you want to call it, I'll eat it.

It was a friend's birthday recently, and we have very similar taste in cakes (except I LOVE mint chocolate and he HATES it). I knew that this kind of cake would be right up both our alleys and I knew I wanted to whip up something which combined the nutty deliciousness of hazelnut with the sweet smoothness of chocolate. 

Good news - it's easy. Mix dry ingredients. Repeat with wet ingredients. Put them together and bake. So simple for so much deliciousness!

makes one massive three tier cake

Ingredients for the Cake

• 150g plain flour
• 75g ground hazelnuts
• 60g cocoa
• 300g caster sugar
• 1 tbsp vanilla sugar
• 1.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• ¼ cup (60ml) vegetable oil
• ¾ cup (180ml) buttermilk (or semi skimmed milk with a tbsp. of lemon juice)
• ¾ cup (180ml) coffee, cooled – I used praline Nespresso
• 2 large eggs

Ingredients for the Buttercream

• 150g butter
• 150g Nutella
• 250g icing sugar
• 30g cocoa
• 1-2 tbsp milk
• Ferrero Rochers and extra chopped hazelnuts, to finish

Method

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C.

Start with the cake. Grind the hazelnuts with a food processor until you have a consistency similar to slightly chunkier ground almonds.

Mix together the dry ingredients – flour, hazelnuts, cocoa, caster sugar, vanilla sugar, baking powder, bicarb and salt.

Mix together the wet ingredients in a separate bowl – oil, buttermilk, coffee and eggs.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and mix in the wet.

Divide into 3 prepared (greased and lined) cake tins.

Bake for 30-35 minutes until brown on top and cooked through.

Allow to cool on a wire rack while you make the frosting.

This is easy – whip the butter and add the Nutella. Mix together the cocoa and icing sugar and gradually add this to the butter mixture until you have a smooth, pipeable buttercream. It's so easy I forgot to take photos!

Build the cake as usual – sandwich the layers together with generous helpings of buttercream and then make it look pretty on top.

I finished it off with some Ferrero rocher chocolates, roughly chopped hazelnuts and (obviously) edible glitter.