A Beast of a Birthday Cake

I asked my boyfriend what type of cake he wanted for his birthday. He came up with: a chocolate cake with dark, white and milk chocolate chunks inside, a non-fudgey chocolate icing with some nuts and fruit as toppings...The Man knows what he likes!

Above is my final creation. It was a bit of a trial and error, with some frustration with burnt caramel and melting buttercream but I was so pleased with the final result.

It took me two goes to get Martha Stewart's caramel dipped hazelnuts right but they were worth the mess. If you want to give them a go yourself here's a link to her website:

http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/caramel-dipped-hazelnuts

In her recipe she plunges her pan of caramel into an ice bath. When I did this, my caramel instantly hardened and cracked so I can only assume she used a very very heavy bottomed pan. On my second attempt I skipped this step and just worked quickly before the caramel set which worked nicely.