Trashy food: meatcake!

A friend recently hosted a bring-a-plate dinner, with the theme of sweets. I'll post more from this later, but I wanted to post the recipe for one of my contributions: meatcake! Vegetarians, avert your eyes.

I'm much more a savouries person than a sweets person, sweets become all a bit too much for me very quickly, so I thought I'd make this as a twist on the theme. I got a lot of tips from this site.

The meatcake in all its glory (thanks to Bec for this and the last picture)



Here's how I made it!

I mixed together the following ingredients to make a meatloaf mixture:
2kg mince, half beef and half pork
1 onion, finely diced
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 tsp mixed herbs
1/2 tbs crushed garlic
2 tsp tomato paste
a good squirt of barbecue sauce
1 1/2 cups beadcrumbs
Salt and pepper

And then it looks like this:



I divided the mixture into two disposable foil pans, used because I didn't have two cake tins of the same size.



I put them in the oven at 190ºC and cooked them until their juices ran clear when cut into with a knife, which was about an hour and a quarter in my oven. They were then left them to drain on a cake rack (the meat leaks a lot of juices).



Once they had cooled and dried a bit, I put one on a cake stand and spread it with mashed potato. For convenience I used a packet of Deb potato - I didn't really have the time (or patience!) to cook and make a perfectly smooth mashed potato from scratch!




The final step is to ice the outside of the meat with mashed potato. I did a crumb layer first, by spreading a thin layer of potato over the cake. Next was the final layer using another packet of mash. It was actually quite hard to ice the cake as the potato prefers to stick to itself instead of the meat - I ended up finding that using the back of a very wet spoon resulted in the smoothest sides. I wasn't 100% happy with the result of the icing and would have loved to get it smoother and neater but I ran out of time - and mashed potato (I suggest using three packets of Deb instead of the two that I used).

I decorated the cake with bacon stars (lightly browned bacon, then shapes cut out using a biscuit cutter) and piped potato frosting, as shown in the first picture above.

It went down a treat!

Happy meatcake: