Competition Victory!

I'll start by possibly repeating myself since I can't remember if I've already mentioned that I started a cake decorating course at the local college back in January. If I didn't before, then I have now...

Anyway, tonight was the last night of the course and instead of taking a cake along to decorate in class we had a little competition - we had to take along a pre-decorated cake and they all got judged like at a proper classy village fete.

It was a pretty good turnout but in the end it kind of boiled down to three cakes, which the judges took quite a while discussing and scoring. The full spread is below for your viewing pleasure:

As seen by the West-side posse.

As seen by the East-side posse.

In the end the winner was this one. Which also happens to be the one I made :-).

I'm not sure I totally agree with their decision though. I mean, I was pleased with how mine turned out and everything, but the whole course was based around piping and more classical techniques. The turquoise basket in the middle of the table should really have won since all those flowers were piped and the basket weave itself must have taken a good couple of hours to make.

In any case, I accepted my prize with dignity, poise and graciousness, and wondered to myself whether my victory was owed in part to the Derren Brown mind tricked I played on them - this was the t-shirt I wore to class:

Action Photo!

I'm back from holiday now and just about adjusted to the local time zone.

There were professional photographers on the mountain taking photos of everybody coming down one of the runs. I've just been poring through the pictures on their website and found myself:

I'm not quite ready to pay the $35 they want for a 5x7 print so I guess I'll just have to settle for these thumbnail versions...

Photosynth - Sand Harbor

We went for a drive around Lake Tahoe the day before yesterday in the Durango and, surprisingly, survived some of the dodgy roads.

We stopped at a little snow-covered beach called Sand Harbor for a cheeky photo opportunity and I wanted to try the new (free) Photosynth software from Microsoft - you basically take a load of overlapping photos of a scene and then upload them to a site which stitches them together into a continuous, scrollable image. Well, sort of...

You need to download and install the Photosynth client to make it work, but here's my synth of Sand Harbour (click and drag to scroll the camera angle):



If that doesn't work or you don't want to download the client, here's a Flickr folder with the images in. (Incidentally, Flickr has recently started letting you create unlimited sets on free accounts).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21714162@N07/sets/72157615437914973

American Cars

I'm in the middle of a snowboarding holiday at the moment and since most of the gondolas are closed today I thought I'd tell you a little bit about our hire car.

It's a Dodge Durango (see below) which boasts a spectacular 13mpg fuel consumption, and a top speed of about 70mph, if you dare take it up that far.



I'm not the one driving but I'm reliably informed it handles about as well as a small barge. In fact, there's even a warning on the driver's-side sun visor:



All-in-all, not the most reasurring thing to see when you've got a drop like this by the side of the road:



The scenery *is* pretty spectacular though if you can take your mind off the car's interesting handling quirks for long enough to enjoy it. More photos to follow...

Desert Island Cake

I made another cake last night - a desert island. There *was* going to be a palm tree on it as well but it didn't quite work out so there's just the not-so-buried treasure.

"You come in here, giving it all that..."

Battenburg / Stripey Cake

Here's a couple more cakes I made this week:

I shunned the traditional pink & yellow combination in favour of corporate colours. Extra brownie points with my client there :-).

This one nearly didn't happen. I forgot I had cake class last night so I had to quickly bake a cake in 2 tins so it cooked quicker, then cut them both in half to cool down quicker as well. I also took some ice to class in a sandwich bag and cooled the separate cake layers individually with it when I got there. It took about 45 minutes to mix, bake, slice and then get to college. Then we only had about an hour in class yesterday so I had to make some buttercream to glue the layers together, coat it in marzipan, colour the icing, roll it and cover the cake and then clean up after myself. Thankfully, I just about finished in time but it was all a bit of a rush.

Watermelon Cake

I've been waking up in the morning lately and the first thing that's been popping into my head is "a cake, right, in the shape of a watermelon", so I made this in the hope it would make the voices go away...

The stripes on the icing are something called "lustre dust" - it's a very fine powder a bit like poster paint powder, but edible. You can either mix it with water (or vodka if you prefer) to create a liquid paint or just brush it on dry, which is what I did to get the mottled effect.

I put a cheeky little surprise inside the cake - yay for red food colouring! I also bunged a handful of raisins into the cake mix to represent the watermelon seeds.

Hopefully that'll make my mornings a little less obsessive, at least until the voices start whispering the next design. I'm turning into a cake-baking puppet to my subconscious :-(