Vintage Heart Cake

Cake One

Preheat oven to 160ºC fan bake / 180ºC bake. Grease a 20cm heart-shaped tin and line with baking paper.

Place sugar and eggs in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer until thick and creamy (about 5 minutes). Gradually beat in oil and vanilla.

Sift flour, baking soda and salt over the top and mix until mostly incorporated. Stir in yoghurt and food colouring and mix until well combined.

Pour into prepared tin. Bake for 40-45 minutes, until a skewer inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean. Leave to cool for at least 10 minutes before carefully turning out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Once cool, cut in half horizontally to make two cake layers (for even layers, we recommend using a cake leveller).

Cake Two
Repeat steps 1 through 5 to make cake 2. After cutting the cakes in half, you should end up with four layers.

Icing
Note: the icing is made in two batches, as a regular hand-held beater or stand mixer will struggle to cope with the full quantity in one go. This is a big cake!

Beat half the butter (375g) with an electric mixer until smooth. Add half the icing sugar (750g), cream (3 1/2 Tbsp), vanilla essence (1/2 Tbsp) and salt (1/4 tsp) and beat on low speed until creamy. Beat by hand with a spatula for a couple of minutes, to help remove any air bubbles. You can make the icing whiter by adding a few drops of icing whitener, if desired.

Repeat step 7 to make a second quantity of buttercream.

Place one of the cake layers on a serving plate. Add remaining cake layers, alternating the light and dark colours, and sandwiching each layer together with some of the white buttercream.

Tint roughly three quarters of the remaining icing with pink food colouring. Tint the remaining icing with red food colouring.

Spread a thin layer of pink icing all over the cake (top and sides), to make a ‘crumb coat’. An icing scraper, offset spatula and decorating turntable are good tools to have for this job. Refrigerate for 10-15 minutes.

Spread a second layer of pink icing all over the cake and smooth out. Refrigerate for 10-15 minutes.

Place red icing in a piping bag fitted with a large star piping tip (we used Wilton 8B). Pipe a shell border along the top edge of the cake and around the bottom of the cake. Refrigerate for 10-15 minutes.

Place half the leftover pink icing in a piping bag fitted with a smaller star piping tip (we used Wilton 4B). Pipe a pink shell border inside the top red border and above the bottom red border.

Fit a piping bag with a petal piping tip and fill with remaining pink icing. Pipe a border underneath the top red border.

Transfer leftover pink icing to a piping bag fitted with a small closed star piping tip. Pipe another border on top of the cake, inside the pink shell border.

Pipe a line of pink icing all the way around the side of the cake, halfway between the top and bottom. Use red icing to vertically pipe a couple of shells at even intervals along this line of pink icing. Gently press a white sugar pearl into each shell.

Add dots of pink icing along the side of the cake, above and below the centre line.

Roll fondant out and cut out letters, placing your desired message on top of the cake.