“All work and no blog makes a blogger a dull worker.”
A few days ago I had a visitor. She called one day to say that it was high time we met since we lived in the same city, & she was landing up that weekend! Her name is Nachiketa, she blogs from Delhi, & is quite the crazy baker! She is one get up & go girl, with an infectious level of enthusiasm & energy. I think I was like that a decade ago. She’s been following my blog for a while, is passionate about baking, & equally passionate about learning. 
So what did we do? She wanted to learn how to bake bread which didn’t happen because there was no electricity most of the morning. Thankfully I had baked an artisan loaf earlier in the morning, so we sat & looked at it, discussed it, looked at the dough in the fridge etc. Then we immersed ourselves into cookbooks & more cookbooks. I shared with her the little I know about taking pictures, the light box, editing in Picasa, making collages etc.
We had a hurried lunch of grilled chicken, penne in a mushroom sauce, a corn salad in buttermilk ranch dressing, & garlic artisan bread. Dessert was a delicious strawberry yogurt panna cotta which surprisingly set very well. I was unsure because I had eyeballed amounts due to the lack of time, but it was ‘goblet– licking’ good!
Post lunch we hit the kitchen. She really wanted to get a window on decorating cakes & cupcakes. I had made a batch of vanilla cupcakes the previous evening to give us a platform for practice! The good girl had baked her version of a Zebra cake & brought it for my kids, but she wanted to frost it first. Here’s what I taught her to do…like it?
Made a ganache to top the cake with. I eyeball amounts of cream & chocolate for ganache now. Threw in about 200gms of dark chocolate & about 150ml of 25% low fat cream into a saucepan, melted everything over low heat, strained it & then let it cool. We covered the cake with the ganache once cooled & of good spreading consistency. Too thin & it will just flow off, too thick & it’ll be lumpy, & sometimes take crumbs off. We did the sides first & then the top, smoothed it out with an offset spatula & voila … we had a platform to decorate! I thought I’d teach her the easiest & quickest way I know to decorate a cake in literally five minutes. I took a bar of dark chocolate at room temperature & grated some chocolate curls out of the medium slots. Put them in the fridge to harden up. Next put about a tbsp of thick whipped cream in a baggie, snipped off a corner, started off making a spiral from the centre outwards, & them marbled it. (You can see step-by-step pictures in a much earlier post here). 
Next we attacked the cupcakes as the day was rapidly coming to an end. We used the left-over ganache, after softening it in the microwave for 10 seconds, & inaugurated her new decorating set to frost these. Take a look!
I had some batter left over after making a dozen cupcakes, some cream from making the ganache, some ganache, & some strawberry coulis + jam from the panna cotta. I baked the left-over batter in a square baking pan, & made a layered trifle pudding the next day. I cut out flowers with small flower cookie cutters that Nachiketa sweetly had given me, & layered the trifle. 
Will post the trifle & yogurt panna cotta recipe soon … both part of my strawberry overdrive! Oh yes, and there’s some frozen strawberry yogurt coming up too!! Sweet dreams!