Kitchen Alchemy

Well I haven’t gotten around to making the Caramel Cream Sponge yet. But I did have a chance to invent something new and special for a friend of mine who was celebrating a very special birthday. As her birthday guests snaffled the decorations off the side of her cake, I was reminded of my fifth birthday, where my friends did exactly the same thing. A lot of people ask me how I learned to make cakes, and I think that birthday would probably be the first time I was exposed to the art of sugar craft. My mum and Aunty Liz spent many nights hand moulding delicate pink sugar roses to decorate my fifth birthday cake. Back in those days a fondant decorated cake was normally white, but Mum decided mine would be pink. And usually the cake underneath was fruit cake, but Mum thought we could try chocolate and see how it worked out. I don’t remember if there was marzipan – there certainly wasn’t any chocolate ganache between the fondant and the cake. The thing I remember was being sung happy...

I've just come out of a meeting where I was day dreaming about a cake my dad used to buy when I was a slip of a girl. I'm going to call it Caramel Cream Sponge Cake. It was sold at a bakery a Greenhills Shopping Centre near Maitland, Newcastle. We didn't go to that shopping centre often. In fact, when I was a girl big shopping centres like Westfield or malls like Stockland weren't very common. I only remember going there a few times - one time being with my Aunty Liz when my little cousin stole a chocolate from the self select chocolate stand in Kmart. But that's a story for a different day. Dad took us to Greenhills once or twice during the time when Mum was working on the chicken farm as an egg collector. It was an awful job, and he'd buy a cake to have ready for when Mum arrived home. He had a thing for coconut and caramel, so the caramel cream sponge was the obvious choice: a double sponge with caramel and whipped cream in the middle sandwiched tog...