The Great Baked Great British Bake Off
This was definitely not as fun as it sounds
The Great British Bake Off as we know it has come to an end. We are still celebrating or commiserating over Candice’s win (spoiler), chuckling at Val’s instas and wishing she was our nan, and mourning the loss of Selasi. When the idea of ‘Baked Bake Off’ came about, we wanted to pay tribute to our favourite programme in the best way we knew how.
We gathered all of the ingredients needed to make Mary Berry’s classic chocolate sponge, borrowed some kitchen sales off a friend and then set about our mission.
It turns out, the last thing in the world that you want to do while stoned is bake a cake. After a considerable amount of time spent monging out on the sofa chatting shit, we got going. Turns out that borrowing the kitchen scales was a huge waste of time. Instead, we opted for a ‘guesstimation’ method, which basically involved putting three eggs into a bowl because that’s the only part of the recipe we could remember and then throwing the other ingredients in as we deemed necessary.
What we came out with was a clumpy, dense mixture which was never going to transform into the light fluffiness of Mary Berry’s cake. However, in the state we were in, the raw cake mixture tasted bloody delicious and we all consumed a considerable amount of the stuff.
We hit a bump in the road when it came to putting the mixture into cake tins. The bump was that we had no cake tins. Eventually after rummaging through my flatmates cupboards whilst literally crying with laughter, we found a cupcake tray and decided that would have to do.
They’re not a mess, they’re informal
After a painstakingly long amount of time in the oven, we pulled out our cupcakes. They were firm to touch and cooked all the way through. Result. We had all the best intentions of leaving them to cool, making a nice chocolate icing and then carefully decorating. However, the icing plan was thrown into the wind along with the measuring out ingredients plan and we just slathered them in chocolate spread.
Had this been a Bake Off technical challenge, Paul Hollywood would have looked at us with that disappointed look that he does so well and told us that we were the worst contenders in Bake Off history. Even if the challenge was to make ’12 identical chocolate cupcakes’, we would have failed epically. We’d be the ones sat on the stools all red-faced as our bake was called out bottom of the list.
Although they looked fucking dreadful, they tasted quite nice, and that’s what truly counts. That said, we won’t be in a rush to apply for Channel 4’s opening series.