Clandestine Cake Club at Cheshire Cookery School

This month's Clandestine Cake Club was a cakey meet-up with a difference. Rather than the usual location of a wee independent café, we were instructed to make our way over to The Cheshire Cookery School in Altrincham!

And make our way over we did, along with a Champagne Truffle Cake.

A rather exciting venue for a CCC, not only was there loads of surfaces for us all to put our lovingly baked cakes onto, but the kitchen showrooms provided some entertainment for mere mortals like me, Bailey, Jeni and Steve who can only afford normal kitchens that don't have sinks in barrels. 

The other advantage of this location was that we got the pleasure of an exclusive cake-making demonstration by The Pastry King, Brett Pistorius.

We all watched, open-mouthed as Brett whipped up the most spectacular Chocolate Hazelnut Cake topped with a passion fruit-laced French buttercream and covered in amazing decorations made from tempered chocolate. 

Not only did his cake look and taste incredible, he was kind enough to give us all a copy of the recipe (and I'm sure I will be able to recreate an exact replica - ha!) and while we watched him bake he told us all sorts of amazing tips that are going to help me in all walks of cooking life. Great stuff.

After the demo was the moment we had all been waiting for... the opportunity to gorge on cake! And what a selection there was - some absolute beauties!

Bailey and I went back to our tactic from last time at Red House Farm of taking small slices of each cake and sharing a plate. 

As usual all the cakes were delicious - Manchester is lucky to have such an array of talented bakers, but I have to say the ones we particularly loved were Sophie's Caramel Chocolate Cake (more detail on Sophie's excellent blog), Jeni's Sticky Stem Ginger Cake (I'm seriously not just saying those two because they are my friends - they were amazing and I went back for seconds of both!), Andrea's mega moist Chocolate Guinness Cake and Avril's Chocolate and Dark Rum Cake. Amazing cakes!

Just like at the last meeting I left feeling very sick, full of sugar and a little bit jittery so I obviously didn't learn not to overdo it. In fact I definitely didn't because I did the exact same thing the next day with the tupperware box of cake we brought home with us!

Still, we all had a fantastic time and I'm really looking forward to next month's event already. Thanks again to Gwyn for playing a blinder and organising yet another super fun Clandestine Cake Club.