Chocolate Malteser cake

It was the boyfriend's birthday last week, so I decided to try to make my first cake! (plus my first time at icing a cake!) I made a chocolate malteser cake, using the recipe from this site.

Ingredients:

For the cake:

225g butter

225g castor sugar

80g malted milk powder

50g cocoa powder

4 eggs

200g self-raising flour

4 tbsp milk

For the icing:

250g powdered sugar

1 teaspoon cocoa powder

45g malted milk powder

125g softened butter

2 tablespoons boiling water

1 packet Maltesers, halved

Instructions:

For the cake:
1. Preheat oven to 180 C (or ~355F). Grease and line two 9-inch cake tins.
2. Cream the butter and sugar until blended. 
3. Add the malted milk powder, cocoa powder, eggs, flour and milk, and beat together until smooth and creamy.
4. Divide the mixture evenly between the prepared tins, and bake for about 30mins, or until well risen and firm to the touch. 
5. Cool in the tin for a few minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

For the icing:
1. Blend the boiling water, malted milk powder and cocoa powder together in a bowl, then set aside to cool. 
2. In a separate bowl, beat the butter and half of the powdered sugar together until creamy, then add the remaining powdered sugar and the cocoa mixture until well blended. 
3. Sandwich the two cakes together with half of the icing, then spread the remaining icing over the top. 4. Decorate with Maltesers around the sides of the cake.

** I only have one cake tin, so I had to cut the cake into half.
Here's what it looked like after baking! (The pock-marks are where I poked the cake to check if it's been cooked)

 My almost-successful attempt at a clean horizontal cut to the cake:

 After icing it! (not bad for a virgin attempt, if I say so myself)

To ice the cake with minimal crumbing, I plopped a dollop of icing in the center of the cake, and then spread it out with a big knife, without turning the knife back in the reverse direction. 
The cake turned out a bit dense, but was still yummy!
If I were to do anything differently, I would probably use two cake tins, as specified in the directions, because it took me an hour to fully cook the cake (and I suspect the top and bottom were a tad burnt). 

Cake-making was surprisingly fun, so I'm going to bake more cakes in the future ^_^