Friday 15 January 2016

Cake Monday - New Year 2016

We race (electronically) and the loser has to bake a cake to feed the office. 
Why? Because we like cake.
Who? Everyone in the office. No one gets out of it. When? 1st Monday of the month. The rules: you make the cake yourself, without any help. You can't 'repeat' a cake. Your cake will be judged on presentation, difficulty and taste, and marked out of 10 by each colleague. When you have baked 3 cakes, you are out of the competition for 1 year.


Kale Cake by Jamie

After all of us over indulging throughout Christmas, Jamie decided to give us a bit of a detox this Cake Monday. Not all of us were pleased about this. It wasn’t an easy cake to make (Jamie has been known previously to attempt simple cakes, such as the pancake choc-chip cake) so this was a challenge. The cake started with an obstacle. Jamie had to purée a huge bag of kale, but forgot he needed to boil it and cool it down first, so he had to do this after blending. He then added eggs, baking powder, salt, apple sauce and vanilla essence. He beat this together, but not as much on reflection as he should have done. He sifted in flour and mixed together. He put the mixture in tins and into the oven it went. To make the icing, he combined apple sauce and icing sugar. The cakes didn’t rise as much as he hoped (due to lack of beating earlier on). He waited to cool and added the icing to the middle and top of the cake and decorated with some blueberries and spelt ‘kale’ in icing.

The Verdict:
The cake was a shock to the system for the office. The main thing being that the cake was bright green and quite flat. Sue gave it a 4 for its “slippery, slidey strangeness” and Sam declared that he was baffled as to why anyone would put kale in a cake. Callum was obsessed over how much it reminds him of the PE mats at school, but still ate the whole thing and decided it was fun. Not everyone turned their nose up at the cake with most praising the effort put into the tricky cake and Adam was overwhelmed as he “hates normal cakes” he branded the cake “decent”. Jamie O said it was ambitious, but tasted like brussel sprouts and Greg ended the marking with “10/10 for originality, 10/10 for the seasonality but unfortunately… it was inedible…”


Kale Cake Average Score: 5.4
We have wiped the board to start fresh in 2016 so Jamie is top of the leader board!




Next time: Jamie O who will be making the cake hungover, but it will be his third cake so he will be out for a year!