Week Seven - Baking

Writing a dissertation is a very discomforting point of life, the sheer size of the task is enough to make anyone go borderline crazy, as well as the realisation that, no I will not be able to do all of this the night before. So this week I've taken up a talent that not only will help me effectively procrastinate but will also enable me to eat my feelings.

Baking.

Now, completely coincidently, one of my very good friends has also turned an age of which I am forbidden to reveal on the internet, so using my clever head, this week I am combining talent finding with birthday cake making! (Also, I'm a student with little money and big imagination)

Scouring the internet for an ideal cake, I settled on a ‘princess castle cake’ to match my friends regal personality (NAAT.)

Next, I set myself off to Sainsburys (not today Aldi!) to buy the ingredients which included food colouring of your choice, to which the 8 year old inside of me screamed in delight at, and vanilla essence, which let's face it, no-one puts in.

Top tip

- Don't rely on the 3G signal on your phone in the supermarket, go all 2002 and write the ingredients down!

As a huge Great British Bake Off fan, I set out a standard worthy of Mary Berry and her ‘no soggy bottom’ rule. So I prepped the kitchen to the cleanest standard you could possibly get a student kitchen and weighted out my ingredients to an OCD standard. 

Then it is a case of simply throwing the ingredients together in some kind of formation until it looks and tastes like raw cake mix should. 

With the base of my cake doing something in the oven and the cake mix bowl licked out, I turned to the fun part - the decorations. 

Every castle has turrets, so using ice cream cones, melted chocolate, sprinkles and a lot of patience I made turrets even Cinderella would be envious of. 

After removing all the cakes from the oven and playing the 'is it cool enough yet' game, I got to building my castle with a knife and a lotta lotta jam - that will probably be the closest I ever come to working in the manual labour trade. I then smothered it in a thick layer of bright green butter icing and put all my decorations around. 

Did it look anything like the inspired picture? In truth, absolutely not. 

Did it taste good? Abso-bloody-lutely.

Talent rating - 8/10 The whole cake was eaten in about 24 hours and only around 40% of that was a drunken food binge.

The end result? WE GOT TEARS!