Mississippi Mud Cake

Father's day was a couple of weeks ago now, but I made this cake for my Dad when my parents came and visited. It is a Mississippi Mud Cake (the BEST chocolate mud cake EVER) with chocolate ganache and white chocolate decorations. I've been meaning to practice making decorations with chocolate and as you can see, more practice is still needed!

Mississippi Mud Cake is so rich and beautiful, the depth of flavour is amazing. My theory is this, when you want to make something chocolate you add cocoa or chocolate, if you want it to be richer you add coffee, if you want it to be extra intense and deeply delicious you add rum or whisky. This cake has chocolate, coffee AND rum = rich, intense and deeply delicious chocolate!

For Mississippi Mud Cake 

Taken from Taste.com

What you will need

• 250g butter
• 200g dark chocolate
• 250ml fresh brewed coffee
• 430g caster sugar
• 60ml rum
• 300g plain flour
• 2tsp baking powder
• 150g milk chocolate
• 30lml cream
• melted white chocolate for decoration

What you will need to do

• Preheat oven to 160*C and grease or line a large spring form cake tin.
• Place butter, chocolate, sugar and coffee in a saucepan over low heat until chocolate has melted. Remove from heat and set aside to cool slightly.
• Add rum and egg to chocolate mixture and whisk immediately until well combined. Add flour and baking powder and whisk until all lumps are removed.
• Pour mixture into prepared tin and cook for 1 1/4 hours or until cooked through. To tell if the cake is cooked, when you insert a skewer into the middle, crumbs should cling to the skewer. Remove from oven and cool in tin. When it is cool turn out onto wire rack.
• To make the ganache, boil the cream and then pour it over the milk chocolate in a bowl and mix until smooth. This is a fairly thick ganache, so it was a bit hard to spread, but I found if I poured it onto the middle of the cake, it spread itself out and I just had to help it around the edges. Oh and there was a lot that cascaded off the cake too! 

• For the chocolate decoration, I experimented with smoothing out the melted chocolate onto strips of baking paper and putting in the fridge to set. I tried adding texture to some by drizzling more chocolate onto some of the strips and added some silver cachous for a bit of sparkle. 
• I also did some on smaller strips of paper and then when they were starting to set I curled them inside a cardboard tube and put them in the fridge to set hard. 
• Other things I tried were cooling a thin slab of chocolate and then scraping at it with a metal scraper to get some shavings. 
• I also added some maltesers for some contrast on the top of the cake :)