What better way to celebrate your birthday than with a LAN party? And what better thing to feed a console of gamers than a companion cube cake?

This recipe is a labour of love - there’s 2.5 hours baking time, plus at least as long again to decorate the cake, and there’s lots of hanging around for the cake to cool. It took me three days to do, but if I could make it again uninterrupted I’d say it would take about 10 hours.

The biggest challenge in making this cake is getting the cube shape. In the end I used an 8” tin, with the cake rising about 2” this allowed me to make two 4” cubes. Because the cake is so big, you need to use a couple of tricks to stop the outside from burning before the middle is cooked. I’ve included those in the recipe below.

I used a Madeira cake recipe as it’s easier to cut and “model” and it keeps longer than a light sponge. Instead of citrus, I used almond flavour and it worked pretty well. I also cheated and used ready rolled royal icing (with some black food colouring to make it grey coloured) and ready made butter icing. Maybe in the future I’ll get up the courage to make my own, but I’m not that competent yet! The one thing that really finished the look of the cubes was a lucky find of edible silver cake spray. It’s worth sourcing as it gave the cakes a brilliant, industrial, metallic shine.

Ingredients

350g butter
350g caster sugar
6 eggs
1.5 teaspoons glycerine
2 teaspoons of almond essence
350g self raising flour
175g plain flour

Decoration

Small jar of apricot jam
Butter icing
250g grey royal icing
250g marzipan
Red food colouring
Edible silver spray

Method

1. Preheat oven to gas mark 2 / 150C
2. Grease and baseline an 8” square cake tin, and wrap a few layers of greaseproof paper round the outside of the tin
3. Cream butter and sugar together until the mixture is white
4. Beat in eggs one at a time, each with a tablespoon of the measured, sieved flour to stop the eggs curdling
5. Stir in flavouring and glycerine
6. Fold in the rest of the sieved flour
7. Transfer the mixture to the cake tin
8. Make a hollow in the cake mixture so that you can see the bottom of the tin,  don’t be scared and make only a little dent. This - along with wrapping the tin in paper - will help the cake to cook more evenly.
9. Pop the cake in the oven for 2 hours or so. After 2 hours start checking the cake to make sure it’s not burning on the outside. If it is, place a baking sheet on a shelf above the cake to reduce the heat a bit. It should be done at about 2.5 hours, just check the cake is done with a skewer - if it comes out clean the cake is ready to come out the oven.
10. Let the cake cool in the tin until it is cool to the touch, then let it cool further on a wire rack.
11. Wrap in clingfilm and put in the freezer for a couple of hours
12. The cake is now hard enough to cut cleanly - slice the top off so that the top is flat, then cut into quarters. The quarters should be about 4” squares and 2” high so you can use them to make two cube shapes.
13. Warm the apricot jam in the microwave, then spread on the sides of the shapes that will face each other (the jam acts like glue). I put a generous layer of buttercream icing between the layers too, but that’s up to you!
14. Glaze the cubes with more jam, then cover them with grey, rolled out royal icing
15. Roll out the marzipan and cut out 8 L shapes and 8 rectangles. Use these to make the square shapes at the corners of the cubes, using more jam as glue.
16. Cut out 10 circles in the marzipan and “glue” them to the middle of each cube face.
17. Use the edible silver spray to give the cubes a brilliant metallic shine
18. Colour the remaining marzipan pink and then cut out 10 heart shapes and “glue” them to the circles.
19. Finish with a light silver spray to make the hearts have a slight metallic shine