I love my Kenwood Prosper

I just bought a cake mixer. Its a Kenwood prosper and it is one fine piece of kitchen machinery! It came with a instructional CD-ROM, and has an anti splash guard. The other day I needed to whip some egg whites until they formed stiff peaks - a task which normally wouldve taken at least 10 minutes, but on my Kenwood Prosper on maximum power, the egg whites formed peaks in half that time. Amazing :)

Experimenting with fondant

Fondant is wonderful stuff. It is essentially edible playdough which you can mould into all sorts of terrific shapes to sit on top of cakes. I used fondant to create the characters in the photos below, and these were used to adorn my cream cheese covered banana muffins. I sold the muffins at uni for $2 each to raise money for some charities I was fundraising for. The fondant itself is quite unpalatable, tasting a lot like sugary plastic. I shall make my own next time!

My first attempts at cheesecake

I recently baked my first cheesecakes using various recipes I found on the internet. The first was a pineapple coconut (http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/23437/pineapple+coconut+cheesecake) and the second was a mango cheesecake (http://www.bestrecipes.com.au/recipe/Mango-Cheesecake-L1938.html). They were made for two different occasions that I attended-a post thesis submitting celebration, and a 25th birthday celebration.

I followed the recipes closely and with only some minor adjustments for decorative purposes. In the pineapple cheesecake for instance, in addition to topping the cake with shredded coconut I added some grated Nestle dark Plaistowe cooking chocolate. In the case of the the mango cheesecake, once it was set I didnt spread the top with passionfruit pulp as suggested but created a layer of passionfruit jelly instead. I then became a bit carried away and tried to make a fancy strawberry arrangement but it ended up looking very odd and was subsequently removed. The fruit left imprints on the cake upon their removal which you can see if you look closely enough :P Since I have never been a fan of cheesecake myself, I ended up eating very little of the finished products. However, I was reassured by the celebrating guests that the desserts were at least semi-palatable :)

The beginning : Birth of the CAKE CLUB

The whole baking obsession began back in Easter this year when I stumbled across a recipe for a beautiful chocolate cake that was decorated with chocolate eggs on taste.com.au. I then had an epiphany and realised that in order to be a functional member of society the onus was on me to make this little gem of a dessert. With great haste I expressed these wishes to Rach, Shae and Emma who (to my relief), all shared my enthusiam for this important task. We nominated their flat as the venue, set a date ( convening on average about once a month), bought the ingredients and not long after that, the four of us were embarking on our grand baking journey. Despite the odd baking disaster, each cake club session has delivered delectable sweet creations fit for enthusiastic face-stuffing sessions that produce short lived regret, and immense satisfaction.