Se7en + 1 At Loot’s Birthday Bake-Off… And A Fabulous GiveAway…

Don’t you love a fab invitation to a party… A cookie tin packed with cookies. To say our little girls were beyond excited!!! We were invited to a bake off with a couple of other Cape Town bloggers to celebrate Loot’s Tenth Birthday. All our cakes were used afterwards for a party for a local, underprivileged play-school. If you want to watch a two minute video, then follow the link… otherwise read on, read on for a fabulous GiveAway…

We set off on a stormy Saturday morning to Loot’s tenth Birthday Bake Off… and was it a party!!!

This is the kind of breakfast we weren’t expecting… lovely!!!

The challenge: to bake and decorate a cake in an hour and a half. We attempted to read the recipe… luckily all the ingredients were measured for us and we had some fabulous help from the chefs working at The South African Chef’s Academy.

Photographer: Graeme Robinson

We nearly failed at the start… chef’s hats are a little tricker than you might imagine!!!

Photographer: Graeme Robinson

We mixed,

We stirred, and we popped it into the oven…

We did some train spotting…

And some tasting…

Photographer: Graeme Robinson

We created some cookies amidst piles of flour…

Videographer: Bernard Myburgh in action.

Something I really liked about this event, is that they had a photographer, and a videographer taking photographs and making a video for us while we baked – very fun idea since I am always trying to photograph and work at the same time. What was funny, with a gathering of parenting bloggers from around Cape Town. The children were totally immune to camera’s and great big lenses that would send most of us into hiding… these children that have grown up with cameras as a way of life… they don’t even bat an eye!!!

And we learnt how to make piping bags…

We created a cake…

And we iced a cake – with lashings of chocolate ganache and heaps of sprinkles.

We definitely weren’t winners on style and finesse… but we had so much fun!!!

Photographer: Graeme Robinson

The Recipe

Moist chocolate cake
Meet the Players: (weigh out in mls)

• Flour (280ml)
• Sugar (185ml)
• Cocoa powder (35ml)
• bicarbonate of soda (2ml)
• Baking powder (5ml)
• Salt (2ml)
• oil (90ml)
• vinegar (20ml)
• vanilla essence (2.5ml)
• Boiling water (185ml)

Play the Game:

• Place all the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl add all the wet ingredients mix to form a batter with a whisk , don’t beat just stir to incorporate.
• Place in a large cake tin with a hole in the center.
• Bake at 180 C for 50 minutes.
• When it comes out the oven de-mould and wrap in cling film to keep the cake moist.
• Ice with Chocolate Ganache

Photographer: Graeme Robinson

Lindt Ganache
Meet the Players:

• Cream 500g
• Chocolate 550g
• Butter150g
• Glucose 90g

Play the Game:

• Bring the cream and the glucose up to the boil.
• Allow to cool to 85 C, add to blitzed chocolate.
• Blitz until smooth, add the butter, mix until all the butter is incorporated

Photographer: Graeme Robinson

The GiveAway

We were totally spoilt and gifted. We have R400’s worth of shopping vouchers for Loot, to GiveAway. Loot is an online store for almost anything… toys, books and all sorts of goodies – delivered to your door… That’s working for me:

“Loot.co.za is an independent online retailer established in 2003 by Michael and Hayley van Rooyen. Since “opening shop”, Loot has grown from strength to strength. The ecommerce frontrunner recently launched a brand new website which offers customers a choice of over 10 million products – including books, DVDs, music, games, electronics, toys and baby products – dispatched anywhere in South Africa. The Loot promise is to provide the customer with an easy, no-frills online experience with a number of safe and secure payment options.”

This GiveAway works in the usual way, comment before the end of Monday, 2 December 2013, and we will draw and publish the winners after that. I won’t respond to your comments as I do on our other posts because I don’t want to be included in our own giveaway.

This GiveAway is open to anyone with a South African delivery address… you can be local or an overseas reader, delivering to friends or family, living in South Africa. If you have won a GiveAway before never fear – enter away.

We really want to thank Loot for a fabulous and thoughtful event, not to mention the fantastic GiveAway. We were not paid or asked to write this post and the opinions expressed are entirely our own.