My Magical Evening with Yolanda Gampp

On the 10th of December I had the incredible opportunity of participating in camp cake. For those of you who don't know what this is, camp cake is a live stream baking event (Facebook live) in which I got to bake along with my food hero Yolanda Gampp AKA how to cake it. In the weeks and days up to camp cake, I counted the sleeps and searched near and far for ingredients and tools. Some of which included: coconut chips, peanut butter chips, Christmas themed sweets and a 10"X 13" cake tin. I ended up having to settle for toasted coconut chips, green, blue and red m&ms and a cake tin that was slightly smaller and was rounded at the corners. I also had to learn how to make my own peanut butter chips because I really did not feel like paying the shipping costs to import some Reese's peanut butter chips from Amazon Canada. The peanut butter chips worked out really well and I would consider putting them in cookies.

The day had finally come for me to "meet" my hero! Unfortunately, I had made a mistake with the time difference and thought I would be starting two hours later than reality. Luckily I noticed this and arrived on time with my kitchen all set up, and most of my ingredients measured out. (It was a bit of a mad panic to be honest!)

During my magical evening, I learnt many new skills and bakes. There were 3 final bakes in the end: a fudge wreath, a coconut chip covered elf sized cake and a candy cane elf sized cake. The candy cane one also had strawberry Santa hats. All were super fun to make but were not free of difficulties. The mini cakes especially. These cakes had just been baked and cut to size with minimal time to rest and become more firm which meant that the crumb coat and icing part of the cake decorating was highly difficult. It also didn't help that the cakes were soaked in simple syrup (as required). As the cakes were only 4" in diameter and quite tall, they moved a lot when I was trying to ice them. As you can see from the picture I ended up with crumbs in my icing....oh well. They still tasted amazing! The cake was chocolate flavoured and had crushed candy canes folded into it!

The fudge wreath was the simplest and most effective (aesthetically) of them all. All it required was melting quite an abusive amount of chocolate (36oz!!!!), condensed milk and peanut butter chips over a Bain Marie until it thickened. Then I decorated it with chocolate bars and "Christmas" themes sweets. It looks pretty amazing, but we are still eating it. It's very decadent and there is a large amount of it!

I enjoyed my evening thoroughly, though I have to say I was pretty exhausted by the end as I had been baking for a whopping total of 6 hours!!! All I wanted to do was flop...which I did....once all the dishes were done and the kitchen was cleaned. I would definitely repeat this again!