With the dark and dreary weather not shifting, I thought it was time for a bit of a colourful bake to hopefully tempt some sunshine to grace us (or at least to let us day dream about the idea of an Italian afternoon filled with ice-cream!)
Now, it’s not quite Italy but, Neapolitan instantly reminds me of summer holidays at my nan’s house where she would always have the freezer stocked up with either Viennetta, Choc Ices or Neapolitan ice cream for all the grandchildren! As an homage to the ice-cream, I turned this bake into a vanilla, raspberry and chocolate three layer cake with flavoured butter cream as so …….
Ingredients
- 225g gluten free flour
- 225g caster sugar
- 225g butter for the cake & 300g butter for the buttercream
- 4 eggs
- 60ml milk
- Raspberry flavouring
- 70g Cocoa Powder
- Pink food colouring
- 600g icing sugar
- Vanilla essence
Method
- Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees
- Grease and line three 7inch cake tins
- In a bowl, sieve the flour and add the sugar and 225g of butter
- Crack three eggs into a bowl, whisk, and add to the dry ingredients
- Mix well until all the dry ingredients are combined, and then add 20ml milk to loosen the mixture slightly (if you’re mixture already seems quite wet, you can leave out the additional milk)
- Split the mixture evenly into three bowls
- For the vanilla layer, add 5ml of vanilla essence to the mixture and fill one of your cake tins
- For the raspberry layer, add a few drops of raspberry flavouring and a small amount of pink food colouring until the mixture is a light pink colour and then fill your next cake tin
- For the chocolate layer, add 50g cocoa powder (more if you like cake extra chocolat-y!) and fill the final cake tin
- Bake all three in the oven for 20-25 minutes until the cake is ‘springy’ to touch
- Leave to completely cool on a wire rack before adding the butter cream
- For the buttercream; cut the 300g of butter into cubes and use an electric whisk to beat it for 5-10 minutes until it turns a lighter colour
- Next, sieve in half (300g) of the icing sugar and whisk again until combined
- Now, add the remaining 300g of icing sugar along with 40ml of milk and whisk well for 5 minutes until you have a fluffy butter cream consistency
- Split the butter cream between two bowls and set aside half of it for later
- With the first half, use this to sandwich together each layer of the cakes, and then add a crumb coat. Crumb coating is a thinner layer of buttercream that seals all of the cake crumbs so that your top layer of buttercream is crumb free and extra smooth. Cupcake Jemma has a really good tutorial on crumb coating and the next stage of the of our method here ….
- Once crumb coated, refrigerate for an hour
- Next, with the other half of your buttercream that you put to one side, follow the same principle as the crumb coating, however, you want to create a thicker layer of icing this time round. Using a knife, cover the whole cake with you buttercream until you can’t see the cake layers.
- Using a cake scraper, hold it flat to the cake making sure that the bottom is flat on the cake board, and use it to smooth out the air bubbles of the buttercream – here is another good tutorial if you haven’t done a buttercream layer before. Continue working your way around the cake until you have a smooth top coat of buttercream icing.
- With the remaining butter cream, split this into three small bowls. Leave one bowl of butter cream as it is, in the second bowl add a couple of drops of raspberry flavouring and pink food colouring and in the remaining bowl, add some cocoa powder to make the chocolate icing.
- I used a Wilton 1m icing tip to create a…. flower like decoration, but feel free to decorate in any way you want. Another good idea would be to pipe some roses in the various flavourings as the decoration, and you could play around with either decorating just the top, or decorating the whole cake
- Once sliced, you should have the perfect Neapolitan flavoured layers with a generous amount of buttercream icing!
The Gluten Free Redhead 