Coffee and Walnut Cake

When I had my fab week off work of baking I also made this fantastic cake. I seriously cannot stop raving about how good this cake is! The recipe is from the first Primrose bakery book but is apparently adapted from a Delia recipe. I had already made both the lemon and vanilla layer cakes from this book and adore the recipes - they always give consistently good results and I had been pondering over making this coffee and walnut one for a while.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of coffee and walnut cakes - if i was buying a slice of cake in a cafe and the choice was between a chocolate cake or a coffee and walnut cake, the chocolate cake would win hands down every time! I think this cake however, has converted me to the amazingness of the coffee and walnut combo!

The first time I made this cake (I've made it an additional 2 times in the space of about 3 weeks..thats how good it is!)I was worried it was going to taste too strongly of coffee. There is coffee in the cake, then once the cake is baked and cooled the sponge is brushed with coffee syrup and then more coffee in the butter cream. I had nothing to worry about - the sponge is a lovely flavour and gorgeously moist thanks to the sugar syrup and the butter cream is still lovely and sweet with just a hint of coffee flavour - just perfect! You'll see from my pics below, I liked the butter cream so much I put about an inch of it inside the cake - looks a bit messy but it was sooooo good!

I also liked the way the sponge had a nice marble effect to it - the coffee and ground up walnuts are added right at the end to the sponge mixture and you are instructed not to stir it too much.

I cannot stress this enough - if you have the primrose bakery book - you MUST make this cake!