Lemon Bunt Cake-Donna Hay Photo Challenge

Don't get discouraged by this photo, keep reading....

In my quest to learn as much as I can about food photography I found some amazing blogs, one of them is Jungle Frog Cooking, by the talented Simone.  Simone takes amazing photos and in an effort to learn from the pros she recently started a Donna Hay styling and photography challenge.  Who doesn't like the photos in Donna Hay magazine?  She has an amazing team of talented people who style and photograph food like no other.  The  second DHSP challenge was to replicate the image below, originally photographed by Con Poulos and styled by Steve Pearce, that appeared in issue 44 of DHM. 

Read Simone's post about her process of replicating this photo and to find the recipe, the cake is worth the butter, really tasty and lemony.  I personally think that Simone did a terrific job, way better than mine.  I like how she explained the process of taking the photo, I will try to do that next time.  I am totally open to feed-back by the way.

Now mine....I started by making one cake but soon realized that my pan was too big so the bunt cake turned out too small.   Then as I was ready to start taking pictures the sun came out ruining my whole set up (initially there was lot of fog so the light was perfect, naturally filtered).  I had to give up on that cake, you can see the only photo I took.

See how the sun totally ruined the effect, too bright!

I then made a second cake doubling the recipe (which required a pound of butter BTW!), so the cake looked better.  I thought I had made the glaze thicker the second time but as you can see on the top picture the glaze pooling happened again and looked really unappetizing.  The light was still too bright, I am sure they used a special set-up to filter the light and bounce it so it looks more diffused (if I knew how to do it I would take picture for Donna Hay too, don't you think?).  I also suspect that they shot the photo with high ISO because it looks grainier than mine, in retrospect I should have tried that.  But I am here to learn, so if I don't push myself I will never improve. 

The official page of the Donna Hay photo challenge is here if you are interested in joining this fun monthly event.  I am looking forward to the next month challenge.

Edited to add the recipe:

Lemon Bunt Cake
from Donna Hay

Ingredients

220 gr butter (melted)

2 large eggs

330 gr caster sugar (superfine)

120 gr sour cream

60 ml lemon juice

2 tablespoons lemon rind (finely grated)

300 gr all purpose flour (sifted)

2 teaspoons baking powder (sifted)

Directions

Preheat oven to 160 C (320F).

Place the butter, sugar, eggs, sour cream, lemon juice and rind in a bowl and whisk to combine. Add the flour and baking powder and whisk until smooth. Spoon into 2 x well greased 4 cup capacity (1 liter) Bundt tins and bake for 40-45 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Cool in tins for 10 minutes. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Lemon icing

320 gr icing sugar (sifted)

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 tablespoons water (boiling)

Directions

To make the lemon icing, place icing sugar, juice and water in a bowl and mix to combine. Spoon over cakes to serve. Serves 8-10