The Crushed Caramel Cake

I thought I would challenge myself to try to create a CRUSHED CARAMEL cake…and although every other part of my cake has turned out well, you can probably see from my photo that I had issues with my caramel!

I am hoping it will receive a NOD FROM GARY for the effort I put into trying to make caramel, which just kept on going wrong!

The sugar kept on crystallising. I ruined three attempts completely, had a fourth attempt that tasted like melted sweet butter. But this was my final attempt (I had no sugar and no butter left, so it was going to have to work) and although rather anaemic, it does taste like caramel.

This is what is was supposed to look like:

Bit of a miss! However it is delicious. As I read through the recipe – I thought it sounded rather like the story of my life! It is full of dates, sweetness, sticky situations, crushed nuts, vanilla essence, smooth caramel flavoured buttercream, lots of honey, it is very deep or tall (I only had seven inch tins, the recipe said to use eight inch tins, so it is a very tall cake).

When I was a little girl, my mum used to bake regularly with me. She loved making date and walnut cake. I remember finding it rather hard to eat – as a little one, I found it kind of heavy on my tummy I must admit. But still I loved baking sessions with mum.

This cake has three layers of date and walnut sponge. The buttercream that is sandwiched between each layer and also has a “naked” skim around the side (that’s the effect where you deliberately leave some of the cake underneath showing) is flavoured with honey and salted caramel. Then there is supposed to be a layer of caramel over the top and dripping over the side with some crushed walnut praline on the top. This was the recipe I followed:

https://www.waitrose.com/home/recipes/recipe_directory/d/date-cake-with-saltedhoneycaramel.html

Some more photos to give you an idea of what I hoped would be a baking success but it turned out that Caramel cannot make her own caramel!!!

I had the slice that said “Mel” and my friends devoured the rest!

I will be dreaming of caramel after the hours I spent on trying to get it right!