A delicious chocolate sponge cake, decorated with chocolate buttercream, Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and Mini Eggs! This Chocolate Easter Cake is quick and simple to make, and requires no special equipment. Perfect for Easter bake sales and celebrations, and an ideal cake to make with kids!
An Easter cake anyone can make!
Google ‘Chocolate Easter Cake’ and you will find many beautiful cakes. But most of them take a long time, use specialist equipment and require professional level cake-decorating skills…
Not so with my Easy Peasy Chocolate Easter Cake. This is a cake that anyone can make (it’s practically foolproof!) and requires no special skills or equipment.
An easy peasy chocolate cake…
The actual cake is a simple chocolate sponge cake, which is very easy to make. All you need to do is beat together butter and sugar. Then mix in eggs, cocoa powder and flour. Split the mixture between 2 round cake tins and pop them in the oven for 20 minutes. Then, once cool, decorate and serve!
Simple Easter cake decoration…
The decoration on this Chocolate Easter Cake is so easy! All you need to do is mix butter, icing sugar and cocoa powder to make a simple chocolate buttercream. Then spread half the buttercream on one cake and pop the second cake on top. Finally spread the remaining buttercream over the second cake and top with Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and Mini Eggs… or whatever you fancy!
No special equipment required
The great thing about this simple chocolate Easter cake, is you don’t need any special equipment. All you need is a bowl, a spoon, a couple of round cake tins and a knife!
A great Easter cake to make with kids!
Because it is so easy, this is a great recipe to make with children! It would be a great way to keep your kids occupied for some time over the Easter holidays… and they will almost certainly have a lot of fun decorating it with all their favourite Easter decorations 😀
How to store Chocolate Easter Cake
To keep it fresh, store this Chocolate Easter Cake in an airtight cake tin or – even better – under a glass dome on a cake stand.
How long will Chocolate Easter Cake keep?
This cake will keep for up to a week, if kept in an airtight container. (Though it will taste at its best in the first 2-3 days.)
Can you freeze Chocolate Easter Cake?
Surprisingly, cake freezes really well! However, you should freeze the sponge cakes BEFORE decorating them. Once completely cold, wrap the 2 sponge cakes first in a double layer of baking paper and then in a double layer of foil. Properly wrapped, the cakes should keep in the freezer for up to 3 months.
If you like this recipe…
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Easy Chocolate Easter Cake
Equipment
- 1 large bowl
- 1 Wooden spoon
- 2 x 7inch (18cm) round cake tins
- 1 regular table knife (or a palette knife, if you have one)
- 1 cooling rack (optional - use your grill rack if you don't have one!)
- 1 skewer (optional - use the handle of a teaspoon if you don't have one!)
- Baking paper
Ingredients
Cake:
- 225 g butter or margarine softened (see Note 1)
- 225 g caster sugar
- 4 large eggs
- 225 g self-raising flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 50 g cocoa powder
- 4 tablespoons milk
Buttercream:
- 200 g butter or margarine softened (see Note 1)
- 400 g icing (confectioner's) sugar sieved (this is really important or you will end up with lumpy icing!)
- 50 g cocoa powder sieved (this is really important or you will end up with lumpy icing!)
Decoration:
- Cadbury’s Mini Eggs (I used 100g)
- Cadbury’s Creme Eggs (I used 2 large ones and 3 mini ones)
- Or any other decoration you like!
Instructions
Making the cake:
- Pre heat your oven to 180C / 160C fan / gas mark 4 / 350F. Grease 2 x 7inch (18cm) round cake tins with butter or margarine. Put a circle of baking paper on the bottom of each tin and grease the baking paper. (There is no need to fully line the tins.)
- Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy looking. (See Note 2.)
- Add one egg and beat until combined. Repeat with the other eggs, adding them in one at a time.
- Add in half the flour and fold it in gently.
- Stir in the baking powder and cocoa powder.
- Add in the remaining flour and fold in gently.
- Stir in the milk to loosen the cake batter slightly.
- Put half the mixture in each cake tin and spread the mixture evenly over the base of each tin. Level the surface with a spoon or spatula.
- Put the cake tins in the oven and cook for 20-25 minutes. When they are ready, the cakes should be pulling away slightly at the sides. To be sure they are done, push a skewer (or a teaspoon handle if you don’t have a skewer) into the cake. If it comes out clean, the cake is done. If it comes out covered in mixture, pop the cake back in the oven for a few more minutes and check again.
- When the cakes are cooked, remove them from the oven. Leave in their tins for 10 minutes, or until cool enough to handle, then turn out onto a cooling rack. (Use your grill rack, if you don’t have a cooling rack.)
- Leave the cakes to completely cool before decorating. (Approximately 1 hour after you have removed them from the tins.)
Decorating the cake:
- Make up the buttercream by mixing the softened butter, sieved icing sugar and cocoa together – you can do this by hand or with an electric beater. I always do it by hand – it’s not very much effort if you are only doing a small quantity.
- When the cakes are cool assess which one is flattest. Trim this one down so it is completely flat (yes I know that means you lose a bit of one of your cakes but…well you’ve got to taste a bit to check it’s ok, right?)
- Spread half the buttercream all over the flat cake top, using a knife. Then put the other cake on top. Cover the top cake with the remaining buttercream and decorate with mini eggs and/or creme eggs and/or whatever else you fancy!
Notes
- I much prefer the taste of a cake made with butter, but the problem with butter is that, if it has been in the fridge, it is rock solid! However, I learnt a very simple trick from the amazing Mary Berry… Fill a bowl with lukewarm water (the temperature of a very little baby’s bathwater). Chop the butter into 1cm cubes. Drop the cubes into the water and leave them for 3 minutes. After 3 minutes, tip the water out. (I use my hand to stop the little butter cubes coming out with the water.) And voila! You should now have perfectly soft butter.
- You can absolutely make this cake with an electric mixer, simply put all the cake ingredients in a large bowl and mix with an electric mixer for about 2 minutes until it looks like cake batter. However, I prefer to do things the old fashioned way (with a spoon and arm power!) and have given you my traditional method above.
- Suitable for freezing. (Undecorated cakes only.)
- Nutrition information is approximate and meant as a guideline only.
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Moireen from Holland says
All your recipes are amazing.
Eb Gargano says
Aw, thank you so much Moireen!
Jenny says
Loved by the kids at Youth Group and will be made again next week for our churches ‘Getting Ready for Easter’ event.
Thank you for proving an easy recipe to make an elegant looking cake. I struggle with elegant – rustic is more my style!!
I did have to add some boiling water to the buttercream icing to combine it all together as was still of icing sugar consistency.
Eb Gargano says
Aw, yay – that’s so great to hear. Thank you for this lovely review! The lovely thing about this cake is it’s easy to make but with all the easter chocolate on top it just can’t fail to look good 😀 Sorry to hear that the icing wasn’t quite the right consistency for you. Not sure why that would be, but at least it was an easy fix – adding a drop of water is exactly what I would have done. Eb 🙂