Salivating as best cakes on show as CWA celebrates 100 years

It was a sea of cakes and biscuits all around, the best of the best.

But the lot of a reporter is to listen with interest and sympathy and report accurately - and not expect anything in return for showing earnestness in a particular topic. Also, I'm not into puff pieces, just puff pastry pieces !

But I did score some secrets !

CWA Land Cookery committee chairperson Denise Hawdon let me in on some intricacies in cake making, some that has produced the best 'lamo' in NSW.

Suprisingly it was tiny and if I ate it, it would have disappeared in one quick gulp.

"See," she says, holding a one-and-a-half inch by one-and-a half-inch morsel, "how she hasn't let the chocolate coating move into the cake base". "See how well the coconut has been sifted."

It's a perfect cube of lamington and I would eat it straightaway if it was offered, but it's not. It's for sale as part of the CWA fundraiser effort, and well, that's okay as fundraising helps those who may be in need, and the CWA is one of our strongest fundraisers in NSW !

Also read: Cudal's very own Masterchef

The baking effort has won Denise's fellow Gloucester branch member Judy Hopkins best lamington prize at the CWA baking competition. It looks delicious.

Looking around the tables, you're seeing the best cakes in NSW, the CWA's reputation so strong, it attracts more kudos than the Sydney Royal baking comp.

So I'm in caking royalty and then Denise shows me the best of the butter cakes and why one is better than another. It's all about icing and flavour.

"Flavour is 60 per cent of the mark," Denise says. Woy Woy branch's cake whiz, Cookery Officer Amy Scott has taken out the blue ribbon. She was recently on a cooking show with Adam Liaw, accompanied by CWA president Stephanie Stanhope. Her cake had been dissected for judging, not dessicated - well, that's not done to butter cakes anyway ! She'd created butter cake heaven.

She's put perfect icing on her cake that sits as sweet as snow on a snow-capped mountain, and no signs of cracking or icing avalanches. Obviously, Amy's hit the flavour button with her fellow judges (of course, the judges don't judge their own cakes) and her Woy Woy CWA branch is over-the-moon at her success.

Like expert drillers the CWA judges drill through the centre of the cakes to taste the flavour. It's been an exhaustive selection process, cake entries having to qualify from branches to CWA zones, then to the final judging at the conference. It's a tiered system.

To even get to final judging is a win. Denise says looking through the butter cake bases, it's important to note there are no holes in the base.

The CWA members are milling around after the judged tables of cakes and well, they're running out the door with them like hot cakes ! I'm leaving as well, no cakes or even a tiny biccy in hand, but inspired by a recipe I've seen for honey mocha cheescake at a nearby stall. 'Do-it-yourself, John', I tell myself, 'be a doer' - like all these fabulous CWA ladies ! I'm learning.

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