There are few candies more iconically linked to spring time and Easter than the candy coated speckled robins eggs. (I am a lesser fan of how they taste, prefering the cadbury mini candied eggs myself.) Last year I made a multi-colored flower cake for spring but this year I wanted to be a bit more classic and emulate the recognizable print of the robin’s eggs!
This cake is easier than it looks and way messier than I had intended. First step is to make the cake! Since the buttercream frosting is colored, you can choose whichever cake you would like for the inside. Funny side-note – I made a chocolate cake and people associated the pastel blue color with mint and were thinking it was a mint chocolate cake — it was not! — it was just a regular vanilla buttercream with light blue coloring. Adding some mint extract may actually be a cool addition in the future though!
I made the cake over two days. The first day is for baking the cake, letting it cool, and then the initial frosting – or crumb coat some call it. Then I put the cake in the fridge to get it nice and cold over night. The next day, I put another layer of frosting on and try and get it as smooth as possible. For this cake, since you add all the speckles and the drip to it, the smoothness does not have to be perfect.
After I finished frosting the cake, I went to try the speckles. I mixed about a tsp of vanilla extract with a tbsp of cocoa for the “paint.” You want it to be a thin consistency, nothing heavy or thick. Then comes the messy part. The article I was reading said to cover everything with wax paper….I did not. Dipping a paint brush into the vanilla/cocoa paint, gently flick the brush so it comes off onto the cake (test in on paper first). At first I thought I was doing super well …and then I noticed the backsplash of our kitchen was completely covered in chocolate!
After the speckles were to my satisfaction, I melted the chocolate chips with a bit of almond milk to make the ganache. For this you want a smooth creamy consistency and then I like to first put some around the edge of the cake before filling it up from the middle out, slowly smoothing the ganache out to push it over the side on parts of the cake for the drips. Then, before the chocolate was set, I placed the actual chocolate candy eggs (cadbury, not robin’s eggs) all over the top of the cake (in case anyone didn’t know what it was supposed to be for)!
There is not getting around the time-consuming aspect of making cakes like this but it helps when all the techniques (like speckles and drips) hide imperfections so you can move a little quicker and still end up with a cake that people will think is “professional”!
Happy Baking
Xx
Kali