Baileys Irish Cream Cake

From: Wendy-Bob

On Aug 27, 2007

I'd like to say first off that this tastes REALLY nice, but quite frankly the whole thing collapsed on me and has been a bit of a nightmare to make. I'll start from the beginning... First up I halved the recipe as there's only me and my other half and there's no way we can eat a cake for 18 (we'll have a good bash at one for 9 though!). Everything was easy enough to make, although I hasten to add that I ended up NOT making the baileys glaze because a) the cake wouldn't hold together and b) because, as it wouldn't hold together, I tried some of the cake and it was very sweet even without the addition of icing. My first issue arose with the cake tins. I couldn't get my head around it. Presumably this is meant to be a rectangular cake with a smaller rectangle on top? I didn't have enough rectangular pans so used two equally sized round ones, which sounded more cake-like to me anyway. My next problem was the Bailey's cheese swirl. I used 5oz white choc chips (but remember I was making it half the size) but when I came to drop the mixture into the cake batter to swirl it just kind of sat on top of the cake batter in big lumps. Anyway, I alternated with more cake batter and swirled it round good and proper but there just seemed like too much of the swirl mixture. Like, maybe there should have been half. I have to say at this point that if this had just been one great big deep round cake with the cheese swirl dropped in on top then this may have worked a little better, but I'm just speculating. So anyway, I did the swirling, popped it in the oven, and baked it for 20mins (I made half the size so less cooking time required). It came out looking great and I left it to cool as directed. The real problems arose when I tried to tip the cakes out of their tins though. There was just so much swirl mixture in each cake that they wouldn't hold together. The cheese swirl had sunk to the bottom of the pan (despite using half the batter to line the pan) and had stuck pretty hard, plus the sheer amount of softer swirl mix was too much for the rest of the cake to hold. I just about managed to get it all out onto a plate but only a quarter or so of it was presentable (see pic). Perhaps I misunderstood some of the directions or perhaps I made some mistakes of my own but I'm pretty sure I followed the directions properly. The only way I can think to overcome the problems is to halve the cheese swirl recipe or perhaps to make one massive great big cake. I am eating this cake as I type and it really is very tasty. I genuinely don't think it needs the baileys glaze - I think it would probably be sickeningly sweet with it, but it certainly does need some tweaking to get it to work properly. I'm sorry to give it 3 stars really because flavour-wise it's 5 stars, but as it didn't hold together and the directions were a bit confusing in places I just don't see how I can give it any more.