I'm full of self-doubt sometimes and always compare myself to the best. What if I am not good enough? What if it's not clean cut? What if it collapses? I don't thrive on people singing me praises. I'm just someone who always strives to the best of my abilities.

I"m always so excited to get queries and orders as it kind of lets my (limited) imagination run along with the ideas that my customers bring to me.

I've known this couple of a few years now - first meeting when I was at my last job and well, we kind of just understood each other and the difficulties of work we went through. I was so happy to hear Mr Irish finally became an Australian citizen last year and 12 months on... they were getting married!

The beautiful flowers are provided by the Bride's florist - very Australian. Native, simple and summery colours. So the cake flavours were summery to match (at least one of them was). Passionfruit & Vanilla and Black forest Kirsch. 

I'm so happy to have been a part of it... even if the weather was hot in the mid-30s!

Merry Christmas, in German.

Why?

Been baking a lot of German-inspired cakes, biscuits and more cakes recently... just like the Black Forest Cake below with tons of whipped cream, kircsh, cherries and of course, chocolate shavings. Ginormous cake for a fundraising event... Think it was pretty popular! And we also made the even more popular Japonaise. Love the texture, the more layers, the better!

Not to mention our gingerbread, cheesecakes and other goodies for the holiday season.

It's been another busy week in and out of the kitchen here and we've been running around all weekend in this weather catching up with amazing people and celebrating birthdays. We managed to finish this huge present cake (cherry chocolate & kirsch = black forest yummy-ness) right on time.

Looks amazing right? ;)

Yield 1 x 10-inch round

Ingredients:
6 eggs
1 C icing sugar
3/4 C flour
3 T cocoa
2 T cornflour
1 t baking powder
1 t vanila
pinch of salt

Method
1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Grease and line cake tin with baking paper.
2. Sift flours, baking powder and icing sugar at least 3 times.
3. Beat eggs on high speed until very thick (stiff ripples in bowl) and increased in volume (at least 5 minutes). Beat in vanilla.
4. Gently sift in dry ingredients and combine.
5. Pour mixture into cake tin.
6. Bake for 30-40 minutes or until skewer inserted comes out clean.
7. Allow to cool in tin for 10 minutes before removing to wire rack to cool completely.

Filling:
600mL thickened cream
1/4 C icing sugar
1 C maraschino cherries (or canned cherries), juices reserved
2 T lime juice
2 T sugar

Method
1. To make the syrup, combined sugar, lime and cherry juice in a small saucepan and simmer until thick. Remove from heat.
2. Put aside some cherries for garnish and chop remaining cherries.
3. Beat cream and icing sugar until whipped.
4. Assemble cake by brushing bottom layer with syrup followed by a layer of whipped cream and chopped cherries. Repeat on remaining layers.
5. Dress cake with remaining cream and garnish.