Chocolate and Caramel Cake

One of my close friends turned 50 today - and normally we don't celebrate her birthday with her on the day itself, what with it being that one day in the year we are "obliged" to be romantic with our other halves and all.  BUT this was a special birthday, and in a year that has been pretty tough for said friend so, we promptly all ditched our other halves on Valentines day and set off for a surprise "party" instead.  The friend thought she was just coming to another friend's house for tea and was totally flabbergasted when we were all hiding in the kitchen with this monster cake!

Cakes for my friends need to involve chocolate, but I wanted to add a different dimension so decided to go tripple layer with a yummy layer of caramel cake sandwiched with salted caramel cream between the two chocolate layers.  I did decide to cover the whole of that with whipped chocolate ganache - the result was probably the biggest cake I've ever made - tasted blumming lovely though ;-) There were 8 of us, and this is the most we could manage!

The caramel layer was a recipe I found on the delightful Pink Whisk's blog - Ruth's recipes are super to follow and work really wonderfully - well they would wouldn't they, her being the almost (and IMHO should have been) winner of GBBO Series 1.  I followed the cake recipe pretty much as is, but I did add the whole can of caramel as I wanted the flavour strong enough to stand up against my chocolate buttermilk cake.  If I give it another go I will definately make thinner layers!