As Happy As Pigs In Mud

I saw a picture of this cake on the Internet and thought no more about it until a member of the  Over The Gate forum made one and explained how she had done it.

As we are as happy as pigs in mud, I decided to make one for our wedding anniversary. It sounded simple enough.

A chocolate sponge cake, covered with chocolate ganache, pigs made from fondant icing and kitkat fingers stuck on with butter cream. I have since seen one using twix bars and my mother-in-law suggested that you could also use chocolate fingers.

Foolishly, I thought that, as pink is a girlie colour, I would find ready made pink icing in the supermarket. Hah! My options were white, red or black. I briefly considered making Large Blacks or Saddlebacks but quickly decided that they wouldn't look appetising enough. So, I bought white icing and pink food colouring and had to knead the colour into the icing to make it evenly pink before moulding the pigs.

Steve didn't quite believe that I had made them, promptly poked one and it's tail fell off.

Butter cream for the 'cement' should have been a doddle but I hadn't checked my store cupboard for icing sugar and I had to make my own.

Icing sugar is simply powdered sugar with a binding agent and I used cornflour. One tablespoon of cornflour to 7oz sugar. I knew it would take ages to pulse sugar into powder so I gave myself a head start and used caster sugar. Incidentally, if you need caster sugar and only have granulated, a few pulses in a food processor will turn granulated into caster.

Making icing sugar was a task that threatened to make me lose the will to live with the upshot that I got to a point where I decided "That will do!"

When Steve said "Ooh! There's something crunchy!" I knew he didn't mean the kitkats... yes, I had made crunchy butter cream. Actually, it isn't unpleasant. It was only mildly crunchy and I had used very little, just to secure the kitkats.

The picture I saw on the Internet had a beautifully smooth, shiny ganache topping for the mud. No mud in our pig pen ever looked like that and, anyway, there is no way on earth that my ganache would set so smoothly. With this in mind I went 'slightly messy', placed a few mud spatters on a couple of the pigs and made a mud headrest for my reclining pig.

I am not much of a baker, and I have too little patience for cake decorating but I am pleased that I made this. It wowed Steve, and that was the main objective.