Chocolate Oreo Cake

So, it was my BIRTHDAY recently. And my lovely boyfriend sourced some cake for me. Now that’s a hard task, because I have high standards for cake. But he found some absolute gems from a local cake shop - one of which was a chocolate oreo cake.

I ate it. It was life-changing. I immediately planned to make my own.

I was really keen to make a square cake, because I could easily chop it up into portions for work, and we want to reduce the number of people touching the baked goods (ie cutting a round cake has a little more contact that picking up a cut slice).

I think that coffee adds the perfect complement to the heavy chocolate flavour here, without making the final cake taste like coffee at all. Also, no matter how fine you process the biscuits, they’ll still probably be too big for a traditional shaped piping nozzle, so I just used one of my faves – the big round one that makes lovely Hershey’s Kiss-shaped dollops of icing.

Makes one large rectangular cake, or one three tier round cake

Ingredients for the Cake

• 375g sugar
• 250g flour
• 90g cocoa powder
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 250ml buttermilk (or 125ml milk + 125ml yogurt, or 250ml milk with a tbsp. of lemon juice)
• 100ml boiling water
• 75ml coffee (2 tbsp instant dissolved in water, or from a nespresso or similar machine)
• 180ml vegetable oil

Ingredients for the buttercream

• 200g butter, softened
• 450g icing sugar
• Pinch salt
• 2 tbsp double cream
• 1 pack of Oreos (reserve two oreos for the topping)

Method

Preheat your oven to 175 degrees C.

Mix together the sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and baking powder and the salt. Make a well in the middle and add the eggs, buttermilk, boiling water, coffee and oil and give it a good old mix. This makes quite a runny batter. Divide into two rectangular brownie pans

Bake for 35-40 minutes until cooked through and a knife tester comes out clean (check after 30 minutes). Set aside to cool.

For the buttercream, beat the butter until smooth and sift in the icing sugar until you get a smooth dough. Add the salt and double cream and give it another good stir.

Now for the Oreo part - separate the cookies and scrape the white filling into the buttercream bowl and beat well. Add the black cookie part to a food processor and blitz until you get very fine crumbs.

Tip these into the buttercream and mix again.

Once the cake has cooled, pipe the buttercream to sandwich the cake, and then add some more to the top. 

Remembering the two reserved Oreos, now put them in the food processor whole and blitz again, but for less time, so you make coarse crumbs. Sprinkle these over the frosted cake.

Slice and Enjoy!