After a taste of cooking as IKEA SwedeCook Apprentice at Cookyn Inc, I was thrilled to receive an invitation to a Hands On Baking Session at Creative Culinaire from Rolleyes!

The session started with an short introduction of Rolleyes, Singapore’s latest online platform for restaurateurs, food bloggers, die hard foodies and casual diners!

Once the introduction was done, out came Chef Judy, Managing Director and Principal Chef at Creative Culinaire!

Chef Judy will be teaching us how to bake a Zucchini Chocolate Cake! What’s a Zucchini? It’s a long, green squash that looks something like a cucumber. Appearance wise, zucchinis and cucumbers share the same dark green skin, pale seedy flesh and long cylindrical shape. However, they are slightly different when it comes to touch. Zucchinis are rough and dry while cucumbers are cold and waxy.

Here are the ingredients that we will be working with! Our zucchini chocolate cake will be a lot healthier compared to the ‘real’ chocolate cake we usually order for afternoon tea.

Before we proceed to practical, we have to first go through our basic baking theory lessons that involved a little chemistry.

Next, she brought us through the entire baking process and highlighted key steps that we need to look out for to ensure the quality of our cakes.

First we cream butter with light brown sugar and salt till light.

Not by hands of course! We are high tech bakers ok. Once this is done, we have our butter mixture ready.

Next we sift the flour. Sifting is essential as it helps to break up clumps and adds air to the flour which helps produce lighter cakes.

Look at the difference! Sifted flour may weigh 20% – 25% less than the original flour. This difference can significantly affect the results, making our cakes more dense.

Next, we toss the chocolate chips, walnuts and zucchini with about half cup of our sifted flour.

And its back to the mixer!

Let’s now turn our attention back to the butter mixture. We will now add in the remaining flour and ….

the zucchini mixture too!

Our final mixture should look like this. Not very appetizing …. yet!

Here’s me cam-whoring while I squeeze the mixture into these cute little cupcakes containers.

Ermm.. it does reminds you of something unsightly … No time to waste, next stop the oven at 175C.

Here the team behind the good stuff. We are called ‘ACES’ – taking the first alphabet of each of our blog names.

While waiting for the baking to be completed in the oven, we were treated to pastries and coffee at the cafe next door. Loved the chocolate cake which was definitely not the healthy version.

We were called back to the kitchen once our cupcakes were out of the oven. Non of our cupcakes caved in, we were pretty good!

Once cooled, we dipped the top portion of our cupcakes into molten chocolate and sprinkled lovely heart shaped toppings to doll it up! Here are my proud creations.

This cutie is my favourite. 🙂

But of course there are more than one way to present your Zucchini Chocolate Cake. Here’s how Chef Judy’s creation looked.

Before

After

Before we leave for class, must take a photo with my Shifu.

I am definitely not the sharpest member in my group but it was a great learning experience for me. Special thanks to Rolleyes & Creative Culinaire for organising the class!

You may also like to check out my other delicious food posts here