The engagement party

I've never really understood the wide-spread tradition of having an engagement party exactly at or slightly before Christmas. Christmas is such a beautiful time of year, I want to enjoy it for its sake and not connect it with another event, however joyful that might be. I even told hubby, when he was only a boyfriend of mine, that if he'd want to propose to me at Christmas, he'd better prepare for an unfavourable answer LOL
So you can imagine my terror last year, when my aunt's daughter announced that she would have her engagement party on 23rd December. Oh why, oh why?? Isn't one busy enough getting ready, baking and shopping for Christmas, why should one waste a whole day for other things, which would be so much more fun at any other time of the year? Anyhow, I survived that party, unaware that this was only the beginning... About two months ago my aunt's son announced that he was having an engagement party... right, you guessed, just before Christmas, on the 22nd. I didn't even have the strength to be really appalled, I was so tired because of all the stress this year and even agreed to make a similar cake as last year, as my cousin's fiancée liked it so much.
So before you start thinking I'm a naughty bitch, I must say I'm really pleased about the happiness of both my cousins, and I happily started planning how to twist the cake to make it unique. But I must say I'm really glad my brother is too young to get engaged, I don't think I would survive another party this time next year LOL In a few years' time, perhaps...

So as for the cake, last year I made Nigella's sour cream chocolate cake from HTBADG and coated it in pink icing, which I made myself - damn the fact that royal icing is not available here - with golden syrup, icing sugar, butter and some food colouring.
This year I wanted something different, so I made a marshmallow fondant, which failed miserably, perhaps marshmallows here are different from the American version, but the icing turned out to be a big chunk of rubber...
Fortunately I had some marzipan and managed to coat the cake in an acceptable way, making it Christmassy at the same time, though I had quite something else in mind when I started LOL But it went down a treat and the fiancée was really pleased, so it made me happy, too.



Festive cake

For the cake:
Follow the sour cream chocolate cake recipe in the book but use 1.5x amount of ingredients and bake in two 22cm tins

For the filling:
250g mascarpone
500g frozen chestnut puree, defrosted
50g soft butter
icing sugar to taste (depends how sweet your puree is)
a few tbsp rum to taste

For the icing and decoration:
250g marzipan
cocoa powder

The filling is very easy to make, just whisk everything thoroughly together and fill and ice the cake.

For the decoration, I rolled the marzipan until I thought it was big enough to cover the whole cake. Actually, I think you could even use 500g marzipan to get a smoother and thicker finish but I only had that much at hand. I coated the cake carefully, cutting the edges off, which I then kneaded with some cocoa powder and rolled out to make the ribbon. I used a ruler to cut out the ribbon evenly and folded it so that it slightly resembles a real ribbon LOL For the Christmas theme, I sifted cocoa powder through a piece of paper in which I cut out some stars.