Limerick Jersey Cake

Is March a big month for birthdays in your world? I have my mom, A (boyfriend), brother, and A's mother all in March. Which is great, as I like to get the important ones out of the way, but March does seem to sneak up on me. I keep forgetting it comes after February :)

I decided to make A a cake that looked like the jersey of his county. He is a very proud Limerick fella so I knew I had to make a solid effort to do it well. This is my first cake so it is pretty rough, but I still enjoyed the process.

Here's what a Limerick jersey looks like (courtesy of the online GAA store):

And here's what I ended up with:

Whaddya think? Does it look like the original?

I started out by making a chocolate biscuit cake, which was very easy and was a great medium to work with. Its fairly rich so a small chocolate biscuit cake would go a lot further than a sponge or Madeira cake of the same size.

To make the cake, I melted together 300g of dark (70%) chocolate with 300g unsalted butter and 4 tbsp golden syrup (or corn syrup) in a bowl over a pot of boiling water.

To that I added 450g of digestive biscuits I bashed with a rolling pin (very therapeutic!)

I lined a 8 inch square pan with plastic wrap and poured the mixture into it and stuck it into the fridge overnight until it set. Once it was ready, I cut a chunk off to be left with a 8 in x 5.5 in rectangle and I cut two triangles out of the remaining 8 in x 2.5 in piece to make the sleeves.

I put a section of white sugar paste at the top where the opening for the neck is and covered the rest in green sugar paste.

I then piped on the details and put a trim of sugar paste around the edges as I cut it a little short on the cake.

I really enjoyed putting it together and it went down a storm. I may make one of the county I support for my birthday :)

So what are your hopes for April? I hope you and yours have a wonderful month!

Peace,
Jenn x