Green, green, green - Chocolate Espresso Cake with Salted Caramel Filling

I wrote a post about lots of green cupcakes with a bit of glitter the other day and I've been wanting to write another post that is about something green. To quickly tell the story again, my friend had invited me to her birthday party which was themed "green" and I had offered to bring something. 

She took me up on that offer and asked if I could make cupcakes. As a suprise for her and her flatmate I decided to make this cake, which I had found on "The Culinary Trial", which looked soooo delicious that I had been waiting to find a good occasion. Maike from the Culinary Trial got the recipe from Steph of "Kleiner Kuriositätenladen" and changed it a bit and I changed it a little bit again. (Unfortunately both blogs are in German...).

The cake itself is a chocolate espresso cake and was filled with a caramel buttercream and some fleur de sel.

This cake was super easy and looked very impressive! Unfortunately I didn't get to try a piece which I guess means, I have to make it again!

Chocolate Espresso Cake (Ø12cm)

90g flour

100g sugar

45g cocoa

3g baking soda

2g baking powder

pinch of salt

30ml vegetable oil

95ml buttermilk

95ml espresso (cooled)

1 egg

1 tbsp vanilla extract

Caramel buttercream

150g butter

250g icing cugar

200g caramel or dulce de leche

fleur de sel to sprinkle on top

Make espresso and let completely cool.

Mix flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt in a bowl.

Add oil, buttermilk, espresso, egg and vanilla extract and mix until thoroughly combined.

Preheat oven to 180°C. Grease 12cm baking pan, pour 1/3 of the mixture (abt 160g) into the pan and bake for  about 10 minutes. In case the cake has risen too much, simply put a small cake on the cake and gently push down, this should make the cake very even.

Remove the cake from the pan and cool and a cooling rack. Grease the pan again and bake the other two layers, one at a time.

Let the cakes completely cool. In the meantime combine ingredients for the caramel buttercream. Spread a layer of buttercream on the first layer, sprinkle a little bit of fleur de sel on top. Repeat this for the other two layers on top. To be able to put the fondant on and to make it look smooth and even you need to cover the whole cake in buttercream and smooth it down with a palate knife. By the way, sprinkling some fleur de sel on the smoothed down buttercream wasn't so smart, you could see little bumps in the fondant...

I had coloured the fondant with green gel colouring. Roll out the fondant, put on top of the cake and gently push it down and smooth it down and around the cake using your hands. Make sure not to have any creases! Cut of any excess, add whatever decorations you want, et voilà, the green chocolate-espresso-caramel cake is done!