[Baking Adventures]

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Zoopa (the social club in our Zoology Department) committee about a cake. They were hosting a fundraising auction and, because I won both judges and people's choice award at this years and last years Bake Off, they wanted me to bake a cake for it.

Whenever I get an unrestrained chance to bake a cake for the masses, the thought of, "Yay! I can do something I've been wanting to for ages," quickly turns to, "Holy crap. What am I going to do?" The choice is overwhelming. Especially given that it needed to appeal to all genders and a range of demographics with a single thing in common: Zoology. I toyed with several novelty cake ideas that were either animal or science based. In the end, I went with something that was just going to taste nice.

The cake was an 8" mudcake, layered and coated with a dark chocolate ganache.



I had to send my sister on a cake board run for the cake, so while I was waiting I started making the "sides" of the box. It was not my original intention to make them separately, but it did help get them a bit neater.



The cake is designed to look like a box of truffles. I gave it brown/chocolate stripes to make it slightly more gender neutral, then swirled with black fondant piping.



I wanted the cake to have a monogram logo. Ordinarily I would have used the name of the recipient for the purpose, but as the cake wasn't for anyone in particular I gave it a "C" for Cakecrumbs.



The corners of the box are embellished with twisted white fondant piping.



I didn't have time to make a whole range of truffles myself, so I went with the next best thing: Ferrero.



I had to try super hard to resist nomming them myself.



The cake raised $35 at the auction. That's not even cost price, but it was the highest grossing item in the auction. Most items crawled in $1 increments towards a final price of little more. This cake started at $5 and quickly progressed in $5 increments from there, so that was really flattering.

In spite of the smaller-than-expected turn out, it was a fun night with hilarious auctioneers. Went spent the night laughing, eating pizza, and many score some really awesome things for a bargain price. The auction raised a total of $600 for the social committee.