This is the funniest cake I’ve ever made for Easter so far. It’s an easy-to-make cake with a delicious and refreshing yogurt filling and decorated with a basket weave pattern made of vanilla buttercream icing.  I filled the Easter basked with green coconut grass, added some Smarties mini eggs and 2 chocolate bunnies. You don’t have to be a master chef to make this beautiful cake … just follow the step-by-step instructions below, have some fun and impress your guests this Easter 🙂 !

Time:  120 min, Prep: 80 min.  Cook: 40 min + chilling time
Servings: 12-16                

Ingredients:

For cake:

One 24 cm (9.6 inch) cake. Follow this cake recipe.

For filling:

• 650 g fruit yogurt, at room temperature
• 150 g powdered sugar
• 375 ml whipping cream (+ 70-100 g powdered sugar if the whipping cream is not sweet)
• 30 g gelatin
• 200 g pitted sour cherries

Save the syrup from the sour cherries to moisten gelatin and cake.

For icing and cake decoration:

• 3 cups of vanilla buttercream icing, in your preferred colour
• 100 g coconut flakes
• 1 green food colour spray
• 15-20 Smarties eggs
• 2 chocolate bunnies

Directions:

Cake:

Beat egg whites and water with an electric mixer until stiff peaks form. Add sugar and beat until dissolved. Fold in the egg yolks.

Carefully blend in the flour until just combined.

Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F). Pour batter into springform pan and bake for about 35–40 minutes, or until brown (you can insert a toothpick in the centre and if it comes out clean then it’s ready).

Filling:

While the cake was baking, I made the filling. It’s the easiest filling you can make.

Mix the yogurt and 150g powdered sugar until the sugar dissolves.

Soften the gelatin in a few tablespoons of syrup from your pitted sour cherries and dissolve over hot water.

Make the whipped cream but don’t whip for too long, just until it forms soft peaks.

Mix the yogurt, whipped cream and sour cherries. Take 1-2 tablespoons of the mixture and combine with the dissolved gelatin. Then combine with the yogurt mixture.

It’s important to have the yogurt at least at room temperature (not cold from the fridge) or you risk getting lumps in the mix. My cream had so many lumps because the yogurt was too cold so to fix this I actually had to break up the coagulated lumps with a hand blender :D. As you’ll see the cake didn’t turn out to be a disaster and it actually looked great : )).

Assembling the cake:

Place the cake onto your work surface. Let it cool and then cut the cake horizontally in three. Place the first layer in your square springform pan and moist it with the syrup from the sour cherries.

Using a spatula, evenly cover the top of the first layer with half of the yogurt filling. Place the second layer on top, moist it with syrup and cover with yogurt filling.

Place the third layer of the cake, cover with plastic foil and refrigerate for a few hours or overnight.

Decorating the cake:

This is the very fun part and I will let the pictures speak for themselves. I’ll just mention that you can make the “grass” using a green cooking spray and coconut flakes. Also, for the basket weave pattern, fill your piping bag with buttercream and using a basketweave decorating tip (No. 47), pipe a vertical line on your cake. Next, pipe horizontal lines across the vertical line. Pipe a second vertical line and another set of horizontal lines. Repeat the process until you cover the sides of the cake.