Week One
Emma’s carrot cake WINNER
My aunty Sandra makes the best carrot cake in the world and I will defend it until the day I die. But this carrot cake was a bloody good effort.
Little fake carrots dotted on top, an incredibly sticky and indulgent cream cheese icing, fistfuls of currants thrown in all over the place. There’s a disappointing lack of nuts, but given that there’s a very severe nut allergy sufferer sitting mere metres away from the cake desk, that can be forgiven.
Emma had a right ‘mare making this one. There’s a big spider roaming the halls of her house, and she is, frankly, a complete baby when it comes to spiders, so she had to borrow a kitchen. The cake stubbornly refused to come out of the tin, and our office A/C is set to “Bornean rainforest” so a lot of the icing ended up slumped on the plate (or gluing people’s fingers together).
Given that she couldn’t catch a cakey break, this was a sterling debut.
Hugh’s limoncello and white chocolate cake
Dense. So dense. Like baker like bake, Hugh’s limoncello loaf was pretty but thick.
The limoncello was courtesy of Hugh’s mother, the legendary Dot Bromley. Last time I sampled a small glass of her lethal homemade liquor, I was so inebriated I walked straight into a coffee table and knocked it flying. So if our quality of work was a little off after the cake, you know why.
The flavour was spot on, the lemony sponge sweetened up perfectly by a white chocolate icing.
It was a touch overbaked, so getting a knife through it needed some serious muscle power, and the poppyseeds were an unexpected touch (for Hugh, too – he knocked the packet in by mistake.)
It was a day late, but it was edible.
Week Two
Daisy’s cheesecake brownies
I made these, so obviously they were the best bake ever consumed in Studio Bake Off.
That is a lie. These failed.
I’ve made them dozens of times before in a little square tin and they’re always rich, fudgy, and generally gorgeous. Given that I had 25 hungry creative types to impress, I doubled my quantities, barely adjusted my cooking time, and royally fudged up.
Bit raw in the middle, weirdly sweaty because they’ve been stacked on top of each other for a while, and my marbling was way below my usual standards.
If this was real Bake Off, Paul Hollywood would be giving them a brutal poke and Mary Berry would be doing her weird sympathy held tilt, while Mel and Sue wiped away my tears of chocolatey failure.
Spencer’s sugar rush cake WINNER
Spencer is married to an actual baker, who also works here. We put her under strict orders not to intervene, but if a perfect cake had rocked up today, we’d all know who to thank.
There was no perfect cake. (Although, fine, I admit it was close).
Absolute A* for presentation here, this cake looked like it rolled itself straight off a Pinterest board.
By Spencer’s own admission, an M&Ms layer can cover a multitude of sins, including the ominous crater in the middle of his Victoria sponge.
But the cake was light, the buttercream sweet, and KitKats reign supreme as the world’s greatest chocolate bar. Well done Spencer and Jill. Top effort.
Week Three
Mark’s ginger nuts
Mark’s ginger. He brought ginger biscuits. Honestly, it’s like he wants us to bully him.
Mark got his 11-year-old daughter to make these, I think in a thinly veiled attempt to stop us judging his bake too harshly.
The flavour was good – so good that they could have been tipped out of a McVitie’s packet.
A slight overbake meant that we were in danger of busting our front teeth when eating these crunchy slabs though, and chewing them rendered us all temporarily deaf. “It’s the loudest thing I’ve ever eaten,” said Jill. Quick dunk in a cup of tea and they returned to being glorious.
Presentation as a whole was weird – looked like a clingfilmed bag of heroin – but the biscuits themselves had those lovely ginger nut cracks across the surface and were a gorgeous golden colour.
Harriet, you’re welcome to bake for us any time.
Nicole’s Nick-killing pavlova CLEAR WINNER
Absolutely epic. Nicole’s pavlova – stacked high with all kinds of heaven (cream, chocolate covered strawberries, meringue, nutella, icing sugar) wouldn’t have looked out of place in the window of a Parisian patisserie.
The thought of making meringue gives me heart palpitations, so huge credit to Nicole for knocking this tricky choice out of the park.
She complained that she’d overdone the meringue and it had cracked, but none of us gave a damn and it was demolished in minutes.
So good, I can’t even think of anything funny or mean to say.
Week Four
Kirsty’s Viennese whirls WINNER
Quick bit of background on Kirsty – baking is kind of her thing. She’s made a Death Star out of sponge and rice crispy cakes in the past.
True to form, she picked a demanding biscuit. How do you even make Viennese whirls whirl? Do you just dollop the mixture on a tray then spin it round really fast? I have no idea, but Kirsty filled half of hers with lemon curd and half of them with HOME-MADE raspberry jam.
She put serious time, love, and care into these, and they were a triumph. I’m not just saying that because it’s her birthday, either (but happy birthday Kirsty!)
Dylan’s lemon drizzle loaf
MINUS POINTS. SO MANY MINUS POINTS. THERE WAS A BEARD HAIR IN THE CAKE.
No one expected Dylan to actually bake anything. He had a post-it note on his desk where he’d brainstormed all the ways he could get out of baking.
“Fake an illness. Actually get ill. Join the army.”
You’d think we would all have just been pleased to see a cake at all. But no.
NO CAKE WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER THAN BEARD HAIR CAKE.
(Actually quite a good lemon drizzle once you pick the facial fuzz from between your teeth though)
Daisy Jackson 