We have a bit of a tradition in the office. If it’s your birthday and we know about it, we’ll bake you a cake. By we, I mean either myself or Pam another baking mad colleague and friend. Pam was responsible for the rather amazing The Thick of it themed cake for my birthday.

Anyway, the big boss’s birthday was coming up, and when I say the big boss, I mean like the proper boss, the owner, the founder, Le Grand Fromage. While it might seem a bit brown nosing baking the big boss a big cake, my leftie tendencies mean everyone gets equal treatment, so this means he gets a cake just like everyone else.

And because he’s a bit of a health and fitness fiend, eschews drinking (most of the time), does triathlons, reads up on all the latest science on nutrition, just because of this it had to be the biggest, most indulgent, unhealthiest, booze-laden cake I could possibly make. Immediately my thoughts turned to that titan of the Bavarian sweet trolley: The Black Forest cake. More

The beginnings of this cake started with making a pot of Ghanan peanut soup for a good friend in Brighton. We’d both eaten a lot of the soup so when the inevitable sugar crash hit us we needed pudding. It was Paul who started spreading the leftover peanut butter on slices of a banana bread I had brought along as a gift. Looking back through instagram it seems there was vanilla ice cream involved too. As improvised puds go it was very good, and it set me thinking about making this flavour combo into a cake. More