one two three...cook!

I love Masterchef and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Yes it's over dramatised and yes it has spurned nightmares in which I am devoured whole by Matt Preston, but I like it. 

I like the unashamed hedonism of the judges as they struggle to refrain from launching face first into the plate of food in front of them and I like learning new cooking styles and tricks. But perhaps most of all I like  being reassured of the fact that I am not the only person in the world who is completely obsessed with cooking and food....

Being all too aware of my obsession it  came as no surprise then to my friends when I announced that there had to be a Masterchef style cooking challenge on our recent long weekend island holiday. The deal, I explained to them, was to cook one course with a partner for $15 using what ingredients you could find in the small general stores available to us...to shake it up a bit each team would also need to buy a mystery ingredient each that had to be incorporated into the opposing teams' dishes. The final challenge was to make it dairy free to accommodate for allergies...

Nerd baking

Nerd Baking is the act of producing baked treats with nerdy theme. Being a chemistry PhD student I am well akin with the realms of the nerd and delight in producing sugary homages to my intellectual endeavours....

The Periodic Table Cake

This was a joint venture between me and a fellow baking obsessed chemistry nerd. We set ourselves the challenge of producing the entire periodic table in fudgey chocolate cake form as the centre piece of an afters party proceeding an organic chemistry symposium (it seemed appropriate) I think we chose our audience well....