November Clandestine Cake Club- Hungry Caterpillar Cake

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I've been a bit of a regular at Clandestine Cake Club in Leeds over the past several months, and watched in awe as CCC's founder, Lynn, has taken it from a little group of cake-lovers in Leeds to a national phenomenon, a network of bakers across the country. Each event books up really quickly and I only managed to get a place by the skin of my teeth this time! Tonight's event in my neighbourhood of Chapel Allerton was organised by Kathryn in aid of Cancer Research UK, and it was a beautiful event in a fantastic venue, the Hummingbird Bar and Kitchen.

I treat each event as a new challenge- a way of pushing my skills a little bit further. It's not a competition and it doesn't matter if the cake's a little (or big) bit of a mess. The theme tonight was 'Nostalgia' and I knew immediately what cake I wanted to make: A Hungry Caterpillar Cake.

I loved the book, 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' when I was a little girl, and I remembered my mother making a cake based on it at some point in my childhood. So when the theme was announced, I rang my mother excitedly to ask for the recipe. Instead I got a nervous laugh, a confession that she had paid a lady to make it for me and an admission that the closest she'd ever come to baking was making chocolate rice crispy cakes.

With no hand-me-down recipe to go on, I decided to make my own, based on what I did remember- a chocolate buttercream swiss roll covered with super-sweet coloured stripey icing. However, when both my food processor and my electric hand mixer decided to die (which is why I need to invest in a KitchenAid asap!), I had to tweak things so that I could make it all by hand.

The first step was to make a basic, simple, chocolate sponge that I could cut into a caterpillar shape, so I used an oblong dish and greased it very well (apologies in advance for my somewhat below-par photographic skills):

I left it to cool for 24 hours- I find it so much easier to ice cakes when they've been left for a day.

I cut the cake into two oblong halves and used one to form the body of the caterpillar, and the other to cut shapes from. I also made a chocolate buttercream and used this to fill and coat the cake.

I then rolled out some coloured sugarpaste icing (I normally mix up my own colours but was rapidly running out of time today so used shop-bought ready-to-roll coloured icing) in green and blue, and cut them into strips. I then cut away the excess.

To make the face, I cut a circle of sponge from the spare oblong, and placed a disc of yellow icing on the front to make the face. I then covered the sides and back of the circle in red.

I used two bamboo skewers to secure the head to the body. I mixed the remaining icing together with a marble effect and rolled it into six long ribbons to form a tail. I cut out white and blue circles to make eyes, and made a mouth from some of the cut-away red icing. I then placed the cake on a baking tray covered with white sugarpaste, painted with a green paint made of food colouring, icing sugar and a couple of drops of water. I then washed off the excess icing sugar with a pastry brush dipped in cold water. Finally I used white chocolate chips as little caterpillar feet (you can't really see them in the photo). I totally forgot to take any photos whilst doing this so the next picture is the finished cake.

Here's my cake with some of the others at the event tonight.

My absolute favourite cake of the night was the Sour Cream Coffee Cake (in centre of photo above), made by Lisa (@TheYummyYank). This is a cake to go with coffee, and doesn't actually contain it. What it did contain was plenty of cinnamon and pecan deliciousness!

Next month will be a year since Clandestine Cake Club was founded, and what a year it's been! I hope it will be around for many more years to come because it's such a great way to meet cake people, who are of course the best people!

http://www.clandestinecakeclub.co.uk