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Baking Day at the Sydney Royal Easter Show takes some serious preparation. The Show Schedule is released in the second half of the year for the following Easter and it used to be that the entry forms had to be submitted to the Royal Agricultural Society in November.
Yes, November.
Hmmm gee, do I feel like cooking an award winning banana cake next April? Let me see… sure. I have nothing else planned. In fact I’ll also make an orange cake a chocolate cake, a rich plain cake, a date and walnut loaf, three different kinds of scones, a chocolate cake, a carrot cake, an array of slices, and what the heck – I’ll also make and decorate a novelty cake in the shape of a dragon, just because.
You can see how this ends. Come April, a couple of weeks before Baking Day, the feeling that sets in can only be described as Entrant’s Remorse. What WAS I thinking?
I cast my overwhelmed mind back a few months and try to remember exactly how much wine I’d had before deciding that this was a good idea. It’s like having kids, you’re raising one already so what’s the difference if you have another right? Before you know it you’re featuring in a real life version of Eight is Enough. Maybe it’s the same with cats. You get one, and then…
But it’s too late now. The paperwork was done long ago and you’re committed to making a dozen different things for people you don’t know who’ll nibble just a tiny piece of it and then tell you what they think. Where do you start?
For me, I make a list of everything I’m going to make, and get out all the recipes I’m going to use so that I’m not fussing around in the bookshelves when I should be baking.
And by bookshelves I mean the laptop. I use recipes from everywhere and sometimes Pinterest is best place to find them. I will never buy a cookbook that doesn’t have a picture with each recipe and that right there is the beauty of Pinterest. Everything has a photo.
The thing to be careful of though is that a lot of the recipes on Pinterest are American and for Australian cooks that presents a few practical problems.
In my experience the cake batters are much bigger than you need them to be. You can often halve recipes and still get an amazingly tall cake that’s more than enough for a dozen people. Some also have ingredients that aren’t readily available in Australia, or ingredients that you wouldn’t want to use. Corn syrup and Cool Whip are common examples – and the traditionalists at the Royal Easter Show aren’t going to appreciate that!
So job number one is to narrow down your extensive list of possibilities, and choose and adapt the recipes that you like to suit the cake you’re baking.
That means recipe testing. That means taste testing. That means leftovers. That means calls from friends and family who know that Show Day is coming and who, coincidentally, start to feel a little peckish. What are the chances?
My first test recipe was for a revamped Banana Cake. Stand by, that recipe is on its way.