The Perfect Pizza (cake)

Last year I created a pizza cake for my boyfriend's birthday, as he is a great pizza fan (we even work for a well known pizza chain) and I thought it was a novel, but simple to pull off idea.

You will need:
Eggs
Flour
Sugar
Margarine
White/red/yellow/black roll out icing (you can get a handy pack with a small amount of all 4 in in all good supermarkets)
Jam
Icing sugar
Red food colouring
White chocolate

I used a typical victoria sponge recipe for the actual cake. Traditionally you should weigh two eggs and use the same weight in sugar, margarine and self raising flour. I tend to stick to 6oz/170g of each though. Blend the sugar and margarine together, add the eggs and then fold in half the flour at a time with a spoon, to maintain air in the mixture. It generally takes 20 minutes in the oven at 180 degrees c, or 200 for a non fan oven.

I generally do two smaller sponges for the victoria sponge, with jam and cream in the middle, but for this cake I put the mixture in one tin. There may be a little too much, so just stick any excess in some cupcake cases for an extra little treat.

Once turned out and cooled then spread on a layer of jam, for your 'sauce'. For good measure I also spread a very thin layer of red buttercream on, made by combining the icing sugar and some margarine (I do it to taste, just adding a little more or less of the ingredients as needed, based on testing it) and a dash of red food colouring.

Then grate some white chocolate and some yellow icing (not too much of this as it is fairly bright coloured) and sprinkle it over the top.

Make 'pepperoni' by rolling the red icing into a sausage and slicing up into circles with a knife.

For 'mushrooms' make some white semi circles, with a smaller black semi circle in the centre, and add a small rectangle of white at the base. For extra effect I used a fairly blunt knife to press a few lines into the semi circles, to mimic the look of real mushrooms.

I found that less is more for the 'toppings', so just stuck with these two. You could easily use small chunks of milk chocolate for beef, pink icing for ham, brown icing for sausages, cut up strawberry laces for chillis etc. Use your imagination!

This went down a treat anyway and is a fun cake for any pizza fan's birthday, or even as 'afters' for a pizza party with friends.

I just have to get this year's cake sorted now (it is in a week, eeeek!). Wish me luck!