Haryo's cute apron.
The first session of Bake Club kicked off to the sound of whirring hand mixers. Yusof, Nana and Haryo met up at Joyce's (that's me!) flat to embark on their first challenge - Coconut Cream Cake with Lemon Curd. The recipe came from The Noshery's blog (click here for recipe) and actually asked for lime curd. Since none of us had time to make it beforehand, Haryo and I went to Sainsburys to search for it. They didn't have any lime curd, although they did manage to have three different brands of lemon curd. So we ended up subbing that instead.
Brandishing his weapon of choice
Ingredients
The recipe itself was fairly easy, although we ran into a bit of bother when we couldn't find the right sized tins to put the batter in. All turned out fine in the end though. It was great having two teams to prepare separate parts of the cake, as it turned out to be half the work (a quarter of the work, maybe) for everyone involved.
Discussing the finer points of cooling a cake
"Is that enough curd?"
Okay, you probably want to know how the cake turned out. Not bad, not fantastic (my personal opinion, the others may beg to differ). Why? Well, it was really sweet, even for my sweet tooth. I think we could have done with cutting down a quarter or even half the sugar in the recipe. The tanginess of the lemon curd did help to cut through the sweetness, though, and the toasted coconut was a nice touch. Made it smell delicious.
The cake itself was pretty dense and wet though, I wonder if it's because of all that heavy buttercream and coconut cream asked for in the recipe? Then again, it could be because we only left it in for 35 minutes, as opposed to the 45 minutes specified in the recipe. Our skewer came out clean anyway.
Ta-da! Result!
Eating time
Innards - gooey and tasty
All in all, I think it was a pretty successful first meeting, and we even managed to make some plans for future meet-ups. Did I leave anything out? Let me know!
