I have always loved the smell of fresh coffee and coffee flavoured things but it wasn't until I was 18 that I actually started drinking the stuff. A iced vanilla latte from starbucks at university was my first coffee experience and the beginning of my love for it! I'm not a fan of tea so for me, coffee and cake is a perfect combination. My mum often made coffee cakes with butter icing when she had her catering business and they were delicious so I thought I'd get into the kitchen and make my own. The recipe I have used in the past is Delia's Austrian coffee and walnut cake. I think this is a great recipe because once the sponge has come out of the oven it is soaked in an espresso syrup which makes the cake beautifully moist and gives it a lovely coffee flavour.
I decided to increase the ingredient quantities of mine and bake the mixture in three sandwich tins so give a triple layer cake. Delia uses mascarpone and fromage frais to sandwich the cakes together but I went for a classic coffee butter icing as I don't think you can go wrong with that! Most coffee and walnut cakes are decoared with walnut halves but I find them rather ugly so I thought coffee beans might look a little more attractive. However, crunching on coffee beans isn't all that nice and chocolate ones are expensive so I opted for making them out of marzipan. I think they look pretty realistic, don't you?
