First time is a charm for The National's Infographics Artist Hussain Almoosawi, who has been crowned the winner of the newspaper's fourth annual bake-off.
Almoosawi’s Ricotta-pistachio lemon cake got the most applause in the voting process — which involved the rest of the staff tasting each of the seven dishes and registering their approval through the extremely scientific clap-o-meter method.
Surprisingly, Almoosawi had never baked before he entered the competition.
“This is the first cake I’ve ever made,” he says, adding that it took him an entire month to work on the recipe — his submission for the contest was his third attempt at getting it right.
The other dishes were grapefruit mini cupcakes with buttercream icing (Donna Horvath, Web Supervisor); Lemon wheels (Ross Anderson, Assistant Editor); “Umm Tasty” — lemon cake with frosting (April Robinson, Deputy Art Director); key lime cheesecake squares (Justin Sanak, Business Production Journalist); orange pound cake and chocolate-orange cake pops (Shireen Darwish, Project Manager — Editing & Publishing); and moist orange cake with lemon tea biscuits (Viqar Ahmad, Business Production Journalist).
This year’s randomly selected ingredient was citrus.
“Most of the contestants think citrus is their ingredient. But they merely adopted it,” Sanak says. “April and I are Floridians. We were born into it, moulded by it. We didn’t taste orange juice from concentrate until we were already adults.”
Horvath on the other hand, had a different issue to deal with. She was torn between cookies or cupcakes but eventually settled on the mini cupcakes after being unhappy with the presentation of the cookies. She also wanted to make clear: “I prefer cooking to baking.”
Sanak ended with wise words for future competitors: "Cheesecake bars won by a landslide two years ago but barely registered this year, so today's contest shows that newsroom tastes are evolving," he says. "The National's bakers will have to evolve or be relegated to the obscurities of the news archives."
First time entrant Ahmad was just happy for the chance to make something for his fellow colleagues: “I really enjoyed baking that for everyone,” he says.
Almoosawi took home an apron and a rolling-pin, presented by editor-in-chief Mohammed Al Otaiba.
Roll of Honour
2013 — Chocolate
James Gabrillo, Arts&Life deputy editor
2014 — Blueberry
Justin Sanak, Business production journalist
2015 — Caramel
Stacie Overton Johnson, Food writer
2016 — Citrus
Hussain Almoosawi, Infographics Artist
elau@thenational.ae
