Great __ Bakeoff

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that for the last week I've been excitedly preparing (freaking out) for my company's Bakeoff. Given that we're a bunch of enthusiastic participants (competitive control freaks) I knew I'd be up against stiff competition and have to give it my all.

I wanted to enter a cake that I knew and loved, rather than a recipe that sounded amazing but was just found on the internet. So I dug out a recipe for chocolate chip cake that a childhood friend's mom used to make and that I remembered fondly. It's meant to be baked in a tube pan, but let's remember that we're in England and of course I couldn't find one in time for the competition. Also maybe I didn't want to spend £25 on Amazon for one, and then spent the entirety of last weekend in pubs and not prepping for the competition. Annnnywaaaay. Monday night found me frantically searching the kitchen and homewares shops in Angel for said pan, or a suitable alternative, and I ended up coming up with a layer cake pan. The Irishman helped me test the baking time on a sample test run Monday and I was ready to go for the full bake on Tuesday.

The recipe I used is a cream-cheese batter with chocolate chips inside, and as I was making the layer cake I found a recipe online (ok so I cheated there) for cream cheese frosting. Only problem is, it wasn't stiff enough to cover the imperfections around the side and ended up pooling around the bottom of the cake. Wednesday morning I iced the cake before work and it looked pretty grim.

But some additional icing sugar in the frosting helped some, and once I got to work I spent a bit of time re-doing the frosting and decorating the cake. I called my entry "Choc n Cheese".

The rules for the competition were quite intense, as you can see:

And in the end, I didn't win. But I did enjoy the experience immensely and even better, the cakes were all sold by the slice to my colleagues to raise money for Sport Relief. 

For those of you who were interested in the recipe, here it is:

Chocolate Chip Cake

I c butter
8 oz cream cheese (sold in the UK as either Philadelphia or "soft cheese")
4 eggs
2 1/4 c flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 pkg chocolate chips (I used a 12 oz bag)
1 1/2 c sugar

Cream butter and cream cheese together.
Add sugar and beat until fluffy, add eggs
Separately, mix baking powder and salt with flour
Add flour mixture to butter mixture
Stir in vanilla and chocolate chips
Plop into a tube plan that has been greased and floured
Bake at 300 deg for about 1 hr 20 mins - check that both sides are slightly golden
Let cool 10 mins, and take out of pan.

For the chocolate cream cheese icing, I used this recipe from JamieOliver.com but added a bit more icing (powdered) sugar for stiffness.