What Treasure?

Well the plan was to make a cake for work tomorrow. We are having a morning tea for Women's Empowerment Day. I chose to make Chocolate Treasure Cake from one of my Woman's Weekly cookbooks. You can see the photo of what the cake is supposed to look like on the right of the photo below. See those little tunnels of white chocolate? That's what started my day...

I was to melt some butter and white chocolate to then funnel into the tunnels of the cake. I did this over a water bath but this is what happened; the butter and chocolate separated!

I ended up doing it again but did each separately. But I wasn't game to add the melted butter to the melted chocolate. So I just used the white chocolate and put that inside the tunnels. It seemed to harden up but I don't know how filled the tunnels are (I'll be cutting it apart).

The next step was to do some white ganache (although the book is so old that it refers to this as chocolate cream). I had to melt the white chocolate and cream together - yes that worked, but then the recipe said to add 300ml to the chocolate cream mixture and mix until soft peaks formed. This didn't happen! Instead I got a separated mix.

So at this stage I am cursing and not feeling very empowering (the reason remember why I'm even attempting something new). So I continue on; I mix up some cream until soft peaks form, add some chocolate shavings to this and literally slap it on the cake. I look at it and it doesn't look right. But it'll do.

So what else went wrong?

I had a banana to use up so I used in a Black & White Banana Loaf but the chocolate didn't melt very well. It should have been quite obvious that there was a chocolate swirl in the cake, but instead I got blobs through out the cake. It still tasted OK.

Being on a cooking run I thought that making homemade buns seemed like a good idea (note to self; if it seems like a good idea it probably isn't). I bought buns yesterday but of course they were lunch buns not hamburger buns. When I made the patties I didn't have any eggs left cause of the cakes I had just made so I used a little bit of milk. Anyway... here they are.

Yesterday I had a better day though. I got stuck into the housework and was able to do some quilting. I worked on my Strip Twist from Bonnie's Quiltville website. I had all the blocks made so I sewed them into strips. This is looking quite good. I'm not sure whether I will add borders or not.

Now the really, really good thing about the weekend (and I think the only good thing after by pathetic cooking day) is that.....

drum roll please...

the fence has been put up!