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!