Why I'm not baking along with Bake Off.

I love the Great British Bake Off. I look forward to it every year and last year when I saw all the blogs taking part in the Bake Off Bake Along I thought 'damn, I wish I had been organised enough to do that too!' So this year I decided to do something like it. I started tentative planning of a few recipes I might make and post each week for the themes that usually come up every year. I even made my first bake! Week one is always cake week so I decided to try a double layer Pimm's cake with strawberry buttercream icing. Sounds pretty good, right?

This was the result:

Granted, I had sort of given up on the idea of it looking presentable in any way long before it came to putting the icing on, and the results aren't quite as bad as The Great Scone Disaster, but it's still not great, is it?

I could give you all the excuses: it was too hot that day (it was), I trusted the recipe even when I knew it was wrong (I did), but honestly I think it might just be time to finally admit that pretty bakes are not my thing. It tasted okay! For the most part... And I'm not going to stop baking by any means. I might even share some over the next few weeks. But I don't know about you, but I can't handle ten straight weeks of that.

If you want to try the recipe yourself anyway and see if you can do a better job (I'm certain you can) I used this recipe for the cake (although if I made this again I would definitely use self-raising flour instead of all-purpose and baking powder) and the strawberry icing recipe from this cupcake recipe (I've actually made these cupcakes before and although it was a few years ago now I'm pretty sure they turned out much better than this cake so honestly, maybe just stick with the cupcakes.)

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