Chaos, Cakes and Cycling

Home sweet home!

I come from a fairly large family in this day and age, being the eldest of four girls, so when we all get together things can get a little chaotic. Which is essentially what happened over the Easter weekend when we all congregated on our parents farm to celebrate our first Easter with our new niece, Imogen. It was also her christening, and as I mentioned previously, I had volunteered to do a cake.

Looks can be deceiving

My sister had roughly described what she wanted, two square cakes one top of one another, with the top offset at 45 degrees. There was also mention of ribbon, blocks and pastels, but I figured we could work out the details when we came to putting it together. I did offer her a guarantee though, no matter what it looked like, the cake would taste good!

Tasted as good as it looks!

Before I get into the cake making story (you may want a cuppa, it's a bit of an epic), I just want to brag about my water melon growing skills, as one of the other things I was providing for our family feast was home grown water melon. 

Muscles!

Out of the four water melons that grew in our front yard this year, I brought the baby one home. The baby weighed in at 13.5kg, with the largest that we picked getting to 17.5kg! I have a lot of watermelon juice in my freezer now!

No need to stress

With the cake looming greatly in my mind, I had decided that I would try and get across to the farm before everyone else, so I could at least cook the cakes without commentary! All my sisters are excellent cooks, but only one of them actually cooks like me (chaotic, experimental and completely unable to follow a recipe). My other sisters actually follow recipes and one of them in particular always likes to remind me of the time where my compulsory taste testing resulted in the cake being half the size it ought to have been! Personally, I thought the problem was we followed the recipe!

The beginning . . .

Because I'm much more interested in flavour than looks, I'd decided to do each cake differently. I opted for a cherry ripe mudcake on the bottom and what started out as flourless hazelnut chocolate cake on the top. I wasn't sure of the ability of the flourless cake to hold the icing, so a small amount of flour was added to ensure it didn't collapse. Each cake was cut in half, spread with cherry jam and chocolate butter cream then stuck back together. Then we covered the whole lot in cherry jam and chocolate butter cream and proceeded with the dreaded icing!

. . . more flavour,

I say we because by the time I had the cakes ready for the jam, butter cream and icing I had serious help in the form of my very talented and artistic sister. I exhibited my best engineering skills to stick the cakes together and she very neatly made beautiful pastel coloured icing as well as rolling out pristine white icing. If I had done that we would have ended up with a multicoloured cake!

and perfectly iced.

Anyway, we got the icing on the cake without too much trouble, it even looked reasonably square! With that achieved we took the rest of the afternoon off to go fishing, reasoning we'd be back in plenty of time to finish organising the decorations. As luck would have it the fish were biting well past sundown, even the oysters were biting! My sister actually managed to hook one, stone and all! The problem was, it wouldn't let go!

Imogen's first blocks!

The enthusiastic fishing trip had put a bit of a dent in our plans to decorate and I think we were both a little worried about staying up until 2am decorating a cake! However we came home to an amazing surprise! Imogen's mother had painstakingly created beautiful building blocks from the coloured icing we had made earlier, then added white icing spelling Imogen's name. Absolutely stunning.  

Artistic Talent

Still, my other, wonderfully artistic sister couldn't help but add her own artistic contribution (you'd think that hooking an oyster would be enough awesomeness for one day) and made gorgeous flowers to compliment the blocks. I don't know why I was worried about decorating, I knew I wouldn't have to do it!

Elegant,

Finally we all got to be to get a little sleep before the christening and more importantly, the cake stacking and eating! The christening went well, Imogen was exceedingly patient as well as cute as a button! 
  

and Tasteful!

 


But finally it was time to stack the cake, except perhaps here is where I ought to point out I am not an engineer. As it turns out, I probably should have checked that the diagonal width of the smaller cake wasn't bigger then the width of the larger cake. So with cake stacking ending up as a big fail, we found another cake board, set up the cakes and were ready to go.

But they just don't stack!

About to go

Even though the cake stacking didn't quite turn out as planned, the cakes still looked magnificent and Imogen thoroughly enjoyed destroying her mothers handiwork. And, as promised, they tasted pretty good, and fed many people!

Leftovers!

The road I used to travel

Cake making and eating complete (well actually, we'd be eating cake for days to come), I decided I needed to stretch my legs and go for a ride. You didn't really think I'd go a whole post without mentioning bikes? I actually hadn't planned to ride, but at the last minute I'd thrown my cross bike in the car, just in case. It was worth it, I rode a route that I remembered driving along in the schoolbus as a kid. The cross bike is brilliant for dirt roads, though I did have to do a bit of walking in the sandier patches.

There's no place like home

 

I also managed to go for a ride with my Dad, on a bike I had fixed up for Mum for her birthday (kindly donated by my Aunty). Given that it was a bit of a clunker of a bike, I was very impressed with my Dad as he got it up to 20km/hr in places! Though he did complain about sore legs for the next couple of days.

It was good to get back to the farm, I always miss the wide open spaces and the clear skies. It was a good weekend, and I was proud to be part of the family effort to celebrate our new addition.

Open space and clear skies