DIY Plant Pot Cake and Giant Chocolate Cupcake Recipe

Recently the lovely people at BakingMad.com sent me a package full of baking ingredients to whip up something special with! In the box was an apron to keep me tidy whilst baking, some Billington’s sugar, Allinson flour and a precious bottle of vanilla Nielsen Massey extract. With such quality ingredients I wanted to make a showstopper and decided it was time to dust off my giant cupcake pan!

I’ve experimented with a couple of giant cupcake recipes for the pan but this is a trusty one that always turns out good results:

350g golden caster sugar
350g plain flour
350g unsalted butter
6 eggs (beaten)
90g cocoa powder
85g plain flour
4 tbsp milk

Preheat the oven to 140 degrees centigrade.

1. Cream together the butter and sugar by hand or in a mixer.

2. Mix the eggs and milk and add a little at a time and mix in slowly.

3. Sieve together the flours and cocoa and add in quarters to the batter.

4. Divide the cake mix evenly in between the two halves of the pan and bake in the oven for 90 minutes.

5. Leave to cool and then turn onto a wire rack.

To decorate I made some buttercream and sliced in half the top and bottom of the cupcake horizontally. If you just layer buttercream in between the top and bottom the cake can be a little dry so the extra two layers help and also make it easier to divide the cake up for more people.

I used chocolate sugarpaste to cover the base of the cupcake and cut a strip for round the top to give it the effect of a pot. Admission time here – I did try to make a solid chocolate case for the cupcake by melting chocolate and lining the cupcake pan. All I can say is: don’t believe everything you see on the internet, it does not just pop right out!

After layering the cake I made a second batch of buttercream and coloured it with liquid green food colouring to use as the foliage for the bush. I piped this on using a closed star nozzle and piped in spirals to get the rose like effect.

I made an abundance of cherry blossoms and hydrangeas using flower paste (which you can now buy in the supermarket!) that I coloured pastel pink and yellow. I used some silicone moulds that I bought from ebay a while ago and then add a dot of the alternate colour in the centre.