Honey Fruit Cake for Melbourne Cake Club - A New Cake for a New Year

 

On Thursday, 14 January, we attended the January meeting of the Melbourne Cake Club.  Our theme was A New Cake for a New Year. Originally, we had planned to meet at St Kilda's Catani Gardens for an al fresco meeting, but the weather was not kind to us - it was cold and blustery and intermittently showering.  Accordingly, we instead met at Lady Grange in nearby Fitzroy Street:

 

 

 
Lady Grange is a colourful cocktail bar which also sells "pub grub":

 
There is a large communal bench on the ground floor with stools, as well as tables.  The walls are bedecked with an eclectic range of artworks:

 
Behind our table, there was a James Bond movie poster, fringed by champagne bottles on the shelf below:

 
There were eight attendees at our meeting - Dalya, our leader, and her sister in law, Laura, as a guest; Abi and her seven week old son Joe (not in the attendance count); Corrinne; Sue; our two new members, Lindsay and Marcus; and me.

Dalya had never made a chocolate mousse cake before, so she made this triple-decker beauty with a sponge cake base and dark and white chocolate mousse layers:

 
She made the elegant chocolate curls by drying melted chocolate over a rolling pin.

Sue made this wonderfully light gluten-free pomegranate syrup cake:

 
Corrinne made a grapefruit curd cake, with two layers of grapefruit flavoured sponge filled with marscapone and grapefruit curd, topped with more marscapone and crowned with grapefruit leaves: 

 
I made a Honey Almond Fruit Cake with Cherry and Almond Flowers (some of which sadly sank into oblivion):

 
This delightful cake came from my new baking book, Bake It Great by Luis Troyano of Season 6 of the Great British Bakeoff.  It was not at all heavy, was pleasantly sweet because of the honey and muscavado sugar on the batter, and was filled with luscious dried fruit (in my case, raisins, currants and apricots - I had no sultanas as stated by the recipe).

Abi made a chocolate mud cake filled with luscious caramel ganache:

 
Lindsay, one of our new members, made this impressive rainbow cake filled with lemon curd:

 

 
We accompanied our cake with a beverage of choice (in my case, Prosecco), and tried as much of each cake as we dared.  As usual, the cakes were all delicious and a credit to our bakers.

And the finale - we  took home leftovers of each cake:
 

It was another fun meeting of the Melbourne Cake Club. Next month's theme is Nuts.

Lady Grange

1 Fitzroy St

St Kilda VIC 3182

Phone: (03) 9534 3056