My triumphant return! Part 1.

Allow myself to introduce myself. My name is Katy and I have been baking for as long as I can remember. When I "grew up" I did a cheffing apprenticeship, thinking that I'd get to develop my love of baking, but I found that commercial cookery feels more like a hectic production line than a chance to nourish ones cullinary creativity, so now I'm a nurse/mum. Unfortunately I have had a 2 year hiatus from baking while my nursing career overtook much of my time.

Well, that's enough of that business. Here I am with a fabulous friend, who loves baking as much as I do, starting a new project which is my return to baking! I have never read a blog, let alone written in one, but Susie set this blog up and I simply can't pass up such a socially acceptable form of self indulgence.

Unfortunately, this is what arrived in my mail on Friday:

Appologies for the sideways image. I'm new to this.

I ordered this book a month ago and while it took it's sweet time arriving at Tullamarine (pronounced Tooli-mar-rinay, for those of you that aren't from Melbourne) I completely lost interest in losing baby weight and regained my love of cooking. Oh well, we'll pop that on the bookshelf for another day, ey?

So, what better cake to start with than my all time favourate cake: the Crabapple cook book's white chocolate mud cake! Seriously! It's so yummy it should be illegal!

Making this cake will be a 3 day exercise.

Day one... Baking the cake.

I have inlisted the help of my partner's son, Lochie aged 6, for this project. He is a very enthusiastic helper, although his artistic vision differs slightly from mine, as you will see later.

We made a 2 tiered cake, one dark chocolate and one white chocolate, being careful not to waste all the mixture on the actual cake so that we had enough for some decent cupcakes in the mean time.

Here's a product that I love:

Not that I'm here to advertise, but I just don't like Vanilla extract and I used to spend painstaking minutes scraping out vanilla beans and here's a product that's as good as the real thing and they have taken all the hard work out of it for me!!

Oh, and here's a tip:

Do not put paper cups into a hot tray or they will bend. Who knew? Oh well, every day's a school day!

So... the 2 tiered cake will not be ready for a couple of days, but here are some fabulous cupcakes young Lochie made:

He told me that one of them is fire, one is a sword, one is a pair of eyes and one is a mess! There was also a gun, but he was already eating that when I got the camera out. I don't know if I should be concerned about all of these edible weapons! He's a lovely boy, I swear!

Here are my efforts:

Stay tuned for the 2 tiered cake.............