Chocolate Smarties cake

It's been a while. We inhabitants of the Finchley Kitchen went to western Canada for a month this summer, where the scenery was as absurdly

 beautiful as we hoped, the people so friendly they would practically offer to tie up our Converse, and only one thing confounded expectations: the food. In a good way, luckily. Restaurants in Vancouver and parts of the Rockies are obsessed with sustainable, local, organic, grown a few centimetres from where your fork is at the table, food. For a month we ate well, and pretty healthily.. 

Amazing veggie restaurant Nourish in Banff

And then you know when you get home from a big trip, and you crave the stuff you couldn't have when living in hotel rooms. The pasta sauce just how you like it. The chocolate that isn't fake American-style grossness. Or a massive chocolate cake smothered in Smarties.... 

This one I baked for the dessert course of a Friday night dinner. We stuck candles in it for my sister's birthday, though it wasn't her official cake, that one's coming up... 

But it turned out to be an easy but good-looking method of cake-decoration, so I thought I'd blog it. The cake itself is Nigella's old fashioned chocolate cake, and I then just iced it and let the fondant semi-harden, before using three normal-sized tubes of Smarties, splitting them into colours, and making some wiggly Smarties lines...

And we tucked in whilst telling everyone they need to visit the British Columbia and the Rockies, because look how beautiful it all is...