The weigh-in

So this year was the first year where the men's and women's Blue Boat crews were announced and publicly weighed in together. Initial thoughts: great! Always pro sexual equality, after all we put in the same amount of training as the men do and until recently/probably even still many people don't know about the Newton Women's Boat Race. The number of times we've told people we're training for the Boat Race, only to be met with blank looks, and "I didn't know they had a women's race". Well this is changing, not the fact that there is a women's race, the first one was in 1927, but the attention the women's race is starting to receive is definitely on the rise. On the whole this is great, although it is hard to fathom that anyone is interested enough in our everyday lives to want to come and watch us train at 6am on a cold winters morning, taking photos and recording "sound-bites" of our outings. For us this is just what we do everyday, we no longer really know any different, we do it for the love of rowing and the desire to win, not to attract media attention or to impress anybody.

So back to the weigh-in and yet another trip to London, yet more trains, more tubes, more excessive volumes of people and lack of animals and open space. This trip had the addition of going to a London office for the first and potentially last time, definitely not our dream place of work. But the view was pretty good:

There's even a little bit of grass visible

There were interviews, including the exciting addition of a "Which Blue are You?" scarf - light blue, obvs, which is part of BNY Mellon's advertising campaign of the Boat Race. This now saves our multitude of twitter followers (we wish, probably comes back to our unexciting lives the lack of them) from the daily re-tweets to try and win one.  There were tricky questions such as: if you could have dinner with a famous person who would it be? Trying to pick someone that would be interesting, with good conversation (no rowers then), wouldn't be trying to eat all your food (that ruled out Miranda), wasn't already shot-gunned by one of the others (David Attenborough sadly was already taken) and is real (unfortunately that was Mr Darcy out) proved to be not all that easy.

There were photos, having to alternate with the "other side" for some of them, always a challenge. Although we did have the instant win of saying in our drive for equality with the men we should also be allowed to wear trousers and not skirts. This proved especially useful for the photos of us sitting on the floor pretending to row in Newton's rowing boat decorated floor.

Then for the weigh in itself and time to put on our unisuits, adjust to avoid any VPL/camel toe situations and out into the room full of press, so many cameras. One reporter said we looked nervous walking into the room in our unisuits. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the unisuits that were the problem, you could have made us walk into the room in designer dresses we still would have looked a bit out of our comfort zone. Take a photo of us rowing at 6am in lonely Ely, no problem, we'll be sure to provide you with some of our most attractive effort faces I'm sure, that's our comfort zone, but a London office surrounded by cameras, not so much. Then it was time to hit the scales, a slightly strange experience having your weight projected out to a room full of press with you unable to see it. We have no problem about our weight, we don't train day in day out multiple times a day not hoping to build muscle and subsequently that will mean we should gain some weight. After all muscle weighs more then fat, however, it is still a strange experience having your weight professed to absolute strangers.  In the men's race weight plays a far bigger role, in the history of the men's boat race the heavier crew traditionally has the advantage. In the women's event though there are not the same statistics whether or not it is beneficial to be the heavier crew or not. In the end it all comes down to muscle mass and body fat percentages and thankfully the scales weren't portraying those figures for the world to see, they're saved for the body fat analyser scales that are kept safely at home. The real test of how much muscle we have and how effective we are at using it to propel our weight will come in less then two weeks now on the 24th March, when we line up on the start line against the other side. Then the numbers on the scales and the flashes of the cameras will be forgotten, all that will matter is how fast we get from the start to the finish, and more importantly will it be faster then the dark blues?

Just in case there weren't enough photos we ended up taking a few of our own

GDBO GBBO

Last week, inspired by the Great British Bake Off, we decided it was high time we put our baking skills to the test. Much youtube and recipe book research followed and we finally came up with this masterpiece of a cake:

 Original thoughts were that this may have to wait until after the boat race...buuuut cream cheese frosting. So. many. layers. And obviously our penchant for ganache couldn't keep us away. After about a second thinking about it, all thoughts of sticking to the 'podium diet' were cast aside in favour of an attempt at a slightly scaled down version. As a small aside, the 'podium diet' refers to a certain boat race weigh in, and the attempt to look ok in a unisuit whilst standing on a GIANT pair of scales with GIANT numbers, gives a whole new meaning to the eternal search for the (Ely) beach body.

We began by making chocolate fudge cake mixture, which proceeded to take a long, long time to cook, probably because we made so much mixture to form as many layers as possible. 

So much mixture and a massive bowl to lick out afterwards

Meanwhile we made a lot of ganache and cream cheese frosting (which can definitely be regarded as a recovery food- protein, carbohydrate...what could be more ideal?!) of which we managed to consume a fair amount and drop several spoons into whilst still waiting for the cakes to cook. 

Recommended snack; 1/2 spoon of ganache, 1/2 spoon of cream cheese frosting, mix and enjoy.

Eventually after far too many spoonfuls of the ganache and cream cheese frosting the cake was eventually cooked. Thankfully, yet again the weather was freezing meaning we had the perfect outdoor cooling space for the cake, much to the bemusement of the people walking past the kitchen. Next for the precision slicing of the cake, it always looks so easy on tele - we can tell you it's not that easy especially when you're too impatient to leave the cake to cool properly, however, it is good preparation for the steady hands we'll need for surgery one day.

Holly's concentration face

Then to add the cream cheese frosting, or at least what was left of it after us snacking on it for a good hour or so and start layering.......

Then for the ganache, definitely our favourite part of the cake!

Oozy ganache

A bit of decorating and we have our GDBO GBBO cake:

The cake lasted less then 24 hours it was that good/we'd done enough training we definitely needed that much of it to recover. However, in hindsight our impatience did mean this cake ending up slightly subsiding, attempt 2 however was structurally much better:

We'd like to think this is just the beginning of our baking careers, we've got the whole of race week living together to look forward to lots more baking projects, taller cakes, more layers, different flavours of ganache, etc. Mary Berry should watch out or at least Mel and Sue, we're backing ourselves to make the next series of Bake Off in one way or another, although maybe we should wait and see how the weigh in goes first.....

Sooo many layers!