My friends, January is almost over. Thank goodness. It’s offically the most miserable month of the year (I’m sorry January fans. It’s the truth) and it’s the one where lots of people choose to start trying to eat more healthily. Madness! January is the time for mashed potatoes, gravy and pies.
The time to eat healthily is summer. There’s fresh fruit, salad and amazing stuff everywhere. It’s warm and you just feel like getting outside. Salads feel like the right thing to do.
Now that we’ve got that cleared up, let’s stop pretending that we actually like kale and just eat a great big fat chocolate cake. This amazing chocolate malteser cake is perfect for your Valentine. Yep, it’s coming up! And what better way to show your love than with delicious delicious food?
Clearly you can’t beat a good chocolate cake, but this one is a fun twist on the original with the fantastic pairing of chocolate and malt. With moist chocolate malt sponge, addictively delicious chocolate malt cream cheese frosting, and loads and loads of maltesers, this cake is perfect for birthdays and other special occasions!
In case you’re wondering, the reason I call this the BEST chocolate malteser cake, other than a healthy ego about the cakes I make, is that it truly is packed full of that gorgeous chocolate malt flavour. Lots of the recipes I saw while doing research on this cake, were actually just chocolate cakes with a few maltesers on top. This, my friends, is the real deal.
- 225g unsalted butter
- 225g caster or golden caster sugar
- 4 eggs
- 50g plain chocolate
- 100g malted milk powder (Horlicks or similar)
- 75g cocoa powder
- 230g self raising flour
- 1 tbsp vanilla bean paste
- 1 tsp salt
- 125g unsalted butter
- 200g cream cheese
- 100g plain chocolate
- 100g malted milk powder
- 300g icing sugar
- To decorate - 1 large box Maltesers
- Preheat your oven to 160c/gas mark 4/350f and grease three round victoria sponge style cake tins, about 7 inches wide (although you can obviously use bigger tins, your cake will just be a bit shorter!).
- Cream your butter and caster sugar in a large bowl or stand mixer until soft and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, with a spoonful of malted milk powder with each one.
- Stir in the melted plain chocolate, and then with the mixer on slow, add in the cocoa powder, the rest of the malted milk powder and the flour, plus the vanilla and salt.
- Spoon into your prepared tins, level out the batter with an offset palette knife or back of a spoon, and pop into the oven for around 25 minutes. Start checking them at 20 minutes, and take out to cool as soon as a toothpick pressed into the deepest part of the cake comes out clean of batter.
- We're basically making a cream cheese frosting here, with added yummyness. In a microwave, heat your butter until its almost melted, then remove and whisk by hand until its a smooth liquid with all the lumps gone.
- Set your plain chocolate in the microwave to melt - a couple of 30 second blasts on high power should do it.
- Whisk the cream cheese into the butter mixture, and then shake out your whisk and replace with a wooden spoon. Using a sieve, add 200g of your icing sugar to the butter cream cheese mixture, and the stir carefully and slowly with the wooden spoon. Once incorporated, add the other 200g of icing sugar and the 100g of malted milk powder. Once again, stir carefully until incorporated.
- Remove your plain chocolate from the microwave, and stir into the frosting. Set aside until you're ready to frost your cake.
- Pop your base cake onto a pretty serving plate, sandwich the second cake layer on with the chocolate frosting. I also added some crushed maltesers between each layer.
- If it's a warm day, pop it into the fridge at this point to let the frosting set. Repeat to add the third layer, and refrigerate again if you need to. Otherwise, frost the outside with 2-3 separate layers of the chocolate frosting (so you'll need to frost, refrigerate for 45 minutes and come back) and then add maltesers, starting from the bottom of the cake (this works great to hide the area where the cake meets the plate - always tricky to decorate!).
- Keep in the fridge on a warm day, otherwise just devour!
I’ve entered this cake into the March 2015 We Should Cocoa Challenge – Layer Cakes!
x Kerry
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The cake is absolutely amazing! Ive made it for my daughters 6th bday party,it went dow fantastic with kids and grown ups! Thank you very much for this great recipe!
this is the first whole cake i made. Made this cake on Sunday, and store in the fridge overnight. brought it to the office today (monday) and my colleagues ate it all off before end of the day . i received commends that it is awesome! thank you for your recipe! i used 3 x wilton 8″ cake pan for rainbow cake and it worked well. the batter overflowed a little but overall was ok and didn’t dome much. my icing seems to turned out lighter color and it is quite sticky when i try to ice my cake, i whisk for a minute before decorating but it is still sticky. however, the cake still turn out amazing.
it says cream your sugar and caster sugar – means how many types of sugar is required for the cake?
Hi Amanda – sorry about that – it should read ‘butter and caster sugar’ – I’ve just updated it 🙂
hi Kerry! I’m gonna make this cake again as requested by a workmate for birthday on a Friday. Can I make the cake on Wednesday night and then ice it on Thursday night? How do I store my cake on Wednesday night? Would u be able to advise please. Thanks a lot!
Looks very good, I’ll have to give it a try in the near future!
Yes please Kerry, a big slice for me 😀 I adore anything with malt in (well maybe not beer) and chocolate malt cakes are one of my favourites, especially if covered in maltesers. This looks fantastic. Thanks for joining in with We Should Cocoa.
I tried it out. Wonderful! But I found it too salty and the sponge was a little dry. What do u think happened?
Well, if it turned out dry it must have been overbaked – always be super vigilant about taking cakes out as soon as they’re done for the best result.
Yum, I love how creamy and silky the frosting looks! I made two of these recently for work…but mine were 4 layerered ones! No one can resist a chocolate cake covered in maltesers! I know you love your cream cheese but if you ever make it again try it with this malted belgian frosting from sweetapolita – it’s what I use and is one of my all time fave frostings, it is suuuuuper delish! http://sweetapolita.com/2011/02/campfire-delight-6-layer-rich-chocolate-malted-toasted-marshmallow-cake/
Thanks Gem! It was so silky and delicious- definitely one to eat out of the bowl!
Will definitely check out that recipe- I LOVE sweetapolita!