Christmas Slabcake – chocolate speculoos cake with vanilla topping

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Christmas Slabcake – the festive recipe for a chocolate, speculoos & vanilla traybake is a flavorful Christmas celebration.

What is a Slabcake?

Honestly? I can’t tell you 100% either! Buuuut… if you search on Instagram or the internet, you’ll find many cakes that are baked on a baking tray or in a rectangular dish and beautifully decorated with colorful cream. So, I came up with the following definition for a slabcake for myself (Warning: self-made! 😉):

A slabcake is a cake baked in a casserole dish or baking tray, and then decorated with delicious cream using different piping tips and sprinkles! You could also call it a prettied-up traybake. 😉

The Recipe for our Christmas Slabcake

The cake for this Christmas recipe is perfect to bake with your little ones. Depending on how old your kids are, the challenge lies in decorating the slabcake with piping bags and tips.

But there are different ways to tackle this challenge:

1. Let your child try it (forget perfection!)
2. Skip the piping bag and decorate the slabcake with a spoon
3. You decorate with the piping tip & let your child sprinkle – teamwork is everything 😉

Ingredients

This recipe is for a small casserole dish measuring 27 x 18 cm , and I cut it into 12 pieces. For a larger casserole dish (35 x 25 cm), simoly double the recipe.

Sponge dough

• 2 eggs
• 125 g margarine
• 30 g brown sugar
• 150 g spelled flour
• 15 g baking cocoa
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 50 ml cherry juice
• 1 TL 1 tsp Just Spices “Speculoos Spice”*
• 100 g cherries
• 50 g Chocolate Crunch

Vanilla Topping

• 250 g mascarpone
• 200 ml cream (1 cup)
• 250 g quark
• 2 packet of vanilla sugar (30g)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• red and green food coloring from GoodBake*

Discount code for your purchase at GoodBake: With the discount code “LIA12” you save 12% on your purchase from Goodbake.

Decoration

• Sprinkles (I used these) and these Christmas sprinkles too)

Baking accessories

small casserole dish (mine is 27 x 18 cm)* , kitchen scale, measuring cup, sieve, mixing bowls, hand mixer, spatula, piping bag with different tips

Preparation

Today we’re baking a Christmas slabcake with festive spices – speculoos – and decorated in green & red. Of course, you can decorate the slabcake in any colors you like – let your creativity run free!

The traybake is baked

• Grease the casserole dish, preheat the oven to 180°C (top/bottom heat), and drain the cherries in a sieve.
• Put margarine in a mixing bowl and beat until creamy.
• Add the eggs and beat with the hand mixer for about 20 seconds per egg.
• Add sugar and mix until dissolved.
• In another bowl, combine flour, baking powder, cocoa & speculoos spice, then gradually mix into the margarine-egg-sugar mixture until smooth.
• Add cherry juice (or milk as a substitute) and briefly mix.
• Finally, fold in the cherries and chocolate crunch with a spatula.

• Pour the batter into the casserole dish and bake for about 25–30 minutes. Do the toothpick test to check if the chocolate-speculoos cake is baked through. (For a larger dish, increase the baking time to about 45 minutes – again, the toothpick will tell you when it’s ready.)
• Once baked, let the cake cool in the dish on a rack.

Decoration for the Christmas Slabcake

Since Christmas is around the corner, I chose a red and green slabcake. But of course, you can freely adjust the colors to your taste!

• Whip the cream with one packet of vanilla sugar.
• In another bowl, mix quark and mascarpone with one packet of vanilla sugar and vanilla extract.
• Fold the whipped cream into the quark-mascarpone mixture.
• Divide the cream evenly into bowls and add food coloring as desired (I used three colors – green, dark green, and red – so I used three bowls).

• Using a piping bag, pipe the different colored creams onto the chocolate-speculoos cake. It looks especially nice if you use a different piping tip per color (I used star, rose, and leaf tips) – but it’s not necessary. Even the basic tips included in the smallest piping set* are perfectly fine!

• The magical finishing touch, as always: sprinkles! Your little one will surely enjoy helping sprinkle them on top!

And just like that, you and your minis have created a beautiful Christmas slabcake for your cozy holiday dinner. Yummy!

If gingerbread is your favorite Christmas spice, you can also combine this slabcake with the recipe of our Chocolate-Gingerbread Bundt Cake .

My minis & I wish you and your minis a wonderful Christmas season and lots of fun baking!

Yours, Lia

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Do you still need Christmas presents? Then I now have a few ideas for you!

I put together a small list of (Christmas) gifts for baking fans! You're sure to find a nice little something to give away! Have fun strolling through my ideas.

Have you baked the recipe?

How exciting! We're really happy about that! We are pleased that we were able to delight you with our recipe. Feel free to share your treat with us on Instagram using the hashtag #backenmitminis.

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