The 2nd Annual Baking Challenge occurred this past weekend. Whether we were going to make it was TBD for a few weeks as the date was the Sunday after Katy’s wedding and we had originally been planning on spending the night in Leesburg after the wedding.
This competition proved to be fierce last year and the girls were all in for this year. As such, I cancelled the Saturday evening hotel reservations, went ingredient shopping Friday, and the girls started baking Saturday.
Emerson – Emerson chose to make a lemon bundt cake with lemon icing. Her first one was delicious but the top stuck to the pan! SO, she had to make it a second time. The good news is that we were able to taste the first one and make a few slight modifications (slightly more lemon zest) and it took her considerably less time to make the second cake since she knew what she was doing. She made a delicious icing Sunday, and her cake earned her 3rd place!
Avery – Avery originally wanted to make a zebra cake as did Harper. Avery does not generally help me out much in the kitchen or even know where a lot of the stuff is located in the kitchen so I felt like she shouldn’t make something so complex. With the wedding, I didn’t know how I was going to help their girls make three separate things in the time we had. So Avery ended up going to my parents’ house and making my sister’s famous chocolate chip cookies. They made the dough and she shaped and baked the cookies Sunday just before we went to the event. They were delicious as always. The cookies were a hit! When Jack went for his second cookie, he said “these cookies are out of this world”. Rumor has it that the judges were also disappointed that they only received one cookie to share! The crowd devoured the cookies…there wasn’t a single one left. To my surprise, Avery did not win a prize. Perhaps because it was just a cookie…but it was not just a cookie…it was the world’s best chocolate chip cookie! If there was an award for crowd favorite, she would have secured that in a second!
Harper – Harper made a zebra cake. The recipe was somewhat complex and the amount of batter that the recipe should have yielded came up short and I’m still not sure why. With my guidance we split the two batters but the chocolate was so much thinner than the white batter. To thicken it up we added flour, which changed the consistency. There was leftover chocolate batter so Sunday morning I made a small cake with it so we could taste the cake. Harper said it was good, but truth was it was pretty bad! I was almost about to tell her we were going to make a new cake to go along with the delicious cream cheese buttercream frosting and raspberry filling she had made. But I quickly realized it was her cake, not mine, and she was happy with it. I helped her ice the cake…I probably did more than I should have with actually icing it…the perfectionist in me really wanted to test out my skills on the turntable! Turns out the competition cake was better than the one I made that morning with the leftover batter. Harper earned herself 2nd place!
We had a sugar high all day. I froze the remaining cake for a special treat another day. All the participants did great. The girls had a great time and I’m sure are already looking forward to next year.