Getting my Bake Off at The Big London Bake, Tooting *

I always love baking, but I’m not that great at it to be honest with you. What I see in my head never happens with my hands so I’m usually pretty disappointed with my final product. I’ve only really mastered the Creme Egg Brownie and even then I use a packet brownie mix so it’s pretty much cheating! I’ve tried to conquer macaroons, blondies, chocolate cake, and even Slimming World mug cakes, but have failed at all of them. I think my friends and work colleagues have always just eaten them to be nice!

It may then seem a bit of an odd one that I decided to join the Love Pop Ups London team for an evening baking at The Big London Bake. I wasn’t just any old baking either; it was baking in a very well known looking tent, with a time limit, a set of instructions and some ingredients, you get my drift right?!

Yes, I was about to blind bake my very own French Fruit Tart and I felt very sorry for Leanne having decided to be my partner in crime for the evening. Well, maybe I work better under pressure, maybe I work better in a pair, or maybe lady luck was going to finally give me a break, whatever it was, I was dead chuffed with how well I performed in our 90 minutes.

I managed to make fruit compote from scratch without giving anyone food poisoning and without ruining the pan which always worries me! I even managed, with a little stirring help from Leanne after my arm began to ache, to make chocolate custard from scratch. Leanne made the pastry from scratch also and it was so good. I legit think we could take on the real famous tent and you know, not get knocked in the first week!

Just look how proud we are! What you can’t see is the total mess of the sieve that I used to make the custard with, the mess we made with icing sugar and chocolate powder and the mess of the pans from all the cooking, but as we were being well looked after they were soon whisked (geddit?!) away and cleaned up. That was a huge bonus as the worst bit of baking for me is the tidying up, in fact that’s the worst part of anything!

I’m usually dead heavy handed but I think we decorated our fruit tart really elegantly. Leanne did a great job with creating our letters and not burning them; they tasted lush too!

I carried the tart all the back home and shared it out amongst our lovely neighbours who all seemed really enjoy it. In fact, I think I might have to try and make it again to share out with family as it tasted so good.

The event itself was really good fun, we were well looked after but my only issue is the pricing as I’ve become a little more stingy recently as I’m saving so hard! It’s £39.90 a ticket with VAT and you have to buy two tickets as you work in a pair so a couple of hours will end up costing you just short of £80 which I’m not sure many of my friends would stretch to these days. Putting that aside, I had a really fun evening, learnt new skills and laughed a hell of a lot.