Once upon a time, I used to bake every week for my Uni friends. These days, I’m lucky if I get the chance to bake once a month. The funny thing is, you’d think the less you bake the more ideas you would have, no?

Well. When the final presentation for my Communicating Science and Technology session came around, I thought I should bring along some cake to out end-of-class pizza party.

Aaand that’s about where the thought ended. I have been completely uninspired lately.

Hence, this last-minute rush job:

This is a triple layered chocolate cake filled with random bits and pieces I had lying around the kitchen: white chocolate, cream, frozen raspberries and fresh strawberries.

I topped the lot with whipped cream, strawberries and a white chocolate lattice.

… I then had to break said lattice up as the cake was far too tall to fit into my container. So it ended up looking like this:

I between the 3 major assignments I had due that week, finesse wasn’t on my list of priorities.

There was no time for a crumb coat and I ran out of whipped cream. The raspberries bled into the cream, so far from the beautiful pure white cake I imagined, it looked like it had chicken pox.

Inside it looked slightly better. Each layer has a layer of white chocolate cream, topped with either strawberries or raspberries and covered with more cream.

(Here are some pictures one of my classmates, Josefin, sent me from our post-presentation celebration)

On the bright side, it made it to class in one piece… Hooray! Slightly more squished looking, but one edible piece none the less…

… where it was then promptly cut into many pieces by the lovely Andi (after much debate over who would make the fatal first cut)

Check out those cake-balancing skillz

The verdict? Everyone seemed to love it. So it was either really delicious, or people were just telling me so not to crush my spirit.

Perhaps you should bake one and be the judge:

White chocolate cream gateaux

Ingredients

125g cream cheese 60g butter 185g caster sugar 2 eggs (beaten lightly) 100g melted dark chocolate 250g plain flour 1 tsp bicarb soda 500ml cream, whipped 250g strawberries or raspberries (quartered) Whole berries to decorate   White Chocolate Cream 125g white chocolate 50ml cream

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F) or 160°C fan-forced and prepare pan 2. Cream the butter, cream cheese and sugar until light and creamy in texture 3. Gradually beat in eggs, then melted chocolate 4. Fold in sifted flour, cocoa and bicarb soda alternatively with 185ml water 5. Pour into tin and smooth the surface 6. Bake for 45-50 minutes (or until it passes your skewer or poke test!) 7. Cool the cake inside the tin for 5-10 minutes, then turn onto a rack and cool completely. Meantime, make the white chocolate cream (see below). 8. Cut the cake into three layers. On the first, spread half the white chocolate. You can either then add 1/5 of the cream and then place half the quartered berries, however I placed the berries first and then the cream to get a more even layer (theoretically). Top with the second layer of cake; repeat. Top with final layer. 9. Spread the remaining cream over the cake and decorate as desired.   White chocolate cream 1. Combine white chocolate and cream in a small heatproof bowl and place over a pan of simmering water (not boiling!) 2. Without letting the water touch the sides of the bowl, stir contents of the bowl over the water until chocolate melts and mixture becomes smooth. 3. Remove from heat and cool until mixture becomes spreadable (you may do this in the fridge, but I prefer to let it cool at room temperature to avoid the bowl becoming cold and hardening the outer portion of the mixture

And if you were wondering what we were all presenting, we each had a group project to work on throughout the semester. My group had to do a blog. We wrote one called The Real Science Experience that was all about communicating our experiences studying science at a tertiary level in the hopes of helping some people who are having trouble finding that information.

It was something different again and a lot of fun to blog about. However, it means I now have 8 separate blogs! Oh dear…