Happy New Year - in my kitchen we baked into the New Year!

This is how this cake artist spent New Years eve.... Making a Hazelnut Gateau with light liquor cream a recipe from my trusty "Womens weekly" cookbooks that have been around since my Grandmothers time.

It all started with a bowl of egg whites;

You there are something I absolutely love about whipping egg whites into a frenzy adding sugar bit by bit and watching it slowly turn into a beautiful glossy fluffy white mass of heavenly sweet mergingue. (I don't think I could fit another descriptive word into the sentence!) Its almost too good bake, yet its just gets better and better after it is and turns into something more. Yummy!!!

See what I mean! yummy layers of hazelnut meringue...

The Almonds are plastered to the side and its off to the fridge to have for dessert after New Years Day lunch with my beautiful friend Joanne.

At last!!! New Year is here and its time cut into the Gateau, this is the first time I've made this so its like opening a present, your never quite sure what to expect inside but its the thrill of the unknown thats makes it special in its nice little package.

The aftermath of cutting into it, crumbs everywhere!!! The meringue crumbled as soon as the knife went through it, but that didn't affect the taste, which was AWESOME, sweet, soft, mmmm. The crumbs ended up with French Vanilla ice-cream, the combination of the soft flavour of vanilla with the mixture of liquor French buttercream and hazelnut crunchy meringue is just heavenly.

A look at the cut piece, I think I'll reduce the cooking time of the meringue next time and make it a little more chewy and less dry. I like to do it faithly to the recipe the first time and then make my changes the second time and there after...okay the original recipe didn't have coffe liquor in it, but then I didn't have coffee in the house so....big sigh, it was a sacrific I had to make and poured the liquor in. Tough job but somone had to make the call... I took the fall for all of us...

If anyone wants the recipe just let me know and I'll post it here.