Gaye's Cookery Blog

Congratulations to Namita Kohli, a member of our Community Kitchen, for winning the first round of the Sainsburys Big Bake Off with this fantastic looking dish. Best of luck with the semi-final Namita!

A busy morning today with 7 families and the volunteer from the Real Bread Campaign. Very grateful to Mari to give up her Saturday morning and show us how to make delicious apple bread. It just goes to show how refined bread making can be. Glad to see so many of our younger members working independently now and congratulations to Hugh, our youngest member, for entering the Junior Bake Off competition. He hasn’t yet been selected of course, but even if he just gets a chance to show them what he can do – it will be a fantastic experience!

The Christening Cake by Alice Bryant – 29th May 2011

For my cousin’s christening I made a two tiered cake, it was concealed in a layer of butter cream and baby pink sugar paste and then decorated with white stars.

The christening was on Sunday morning and I knew that the cake would take a long time to cook and decorate, so on Friday night, after Sticky Mitts, I went home to prepare an 18 egg sponge mixture! Split into 4 cake tins. The mixture took a long time to cook (over 4 hours in total!) and while baking one sponge I mistakably opened the oven too early and it dipped down, however, with the help of a carving knife & a careful hand it became level again! After baking them and cooling them overnight, I began the long process of fitting them together and decorating them.

The first stage was to fill them with a mixture of butter cream and strawberry conserve. Once filled they had to be sandwiched together and covered with more butter cream – giving them a smooth finish to work with. Once the butter cream had hardened, I rolled out the sugar paste to approx 3mm thick and placed it on top of each of the two, two tiered cakes, using my hands to help it take shape and then cake smoothers to give it a professional finish. After both cakes had been covered I cut out about 100 white stars to decorate and placed them on with edible glue. The cake looked nearly complete – just a few finishing touches of placing Dowling rods into the cakes and placing the model and flying stars into position on top. With a finishing touch of ribbon, I placed the cake into the centre of the table and it was complete. The result was amazing – the cake looked and tasted great and was well worth the effort. This cake is not an easy starting point and has many components to it , but it is such an achievement and will stay with me forever.

To celebrate the beginning of the half-term holiday we devoted the morning to baking. We made our usual crusty white loaf and I am pleased to say that everyone, including the youngest member of the group, is getting the hang of the “kneading” now.

We watched a tutorial from the Rouxbe online cookery school and learnt the professional way to make chocolate chip cookies. This is certainly the best recipe I have come across so far. One of our group is intolerant to wheat so substituted spelt for wheat flour. This worked very well. Spelt adds a faintly nutty taste to baked goods.

Some of us then made a Victoria sponge cake sandwiched with buttercream and the others a Chocolate Fudge Cake. Indulgent but popular treats for the holiday.

Kevin delivered our usual box of vegetables from the Community Farm but there wasn’t enough time to cook with them so everyone took something home with them instead.

Finally the younger members of the group completed a Rouxbe online quiz about wheat and scored 100%.

Click on the “photos” link on the right-hand side to see photos of the session.

Our new class for years 5-7 is now established. A delightful group of children (a mixture of boys and girls) who are all enthusiastic and keen to learn. So far we have made chocolate brownies, a loaf of bread and vegetable soup.