Great Roath Bake Off 2013!

Well, it’s been a week since the Great Roath Bake Off and we’ve just about recovered from our cake hangovers! Just about ;-)

As ever the quality of entries was fantastic and with 62 cakes in just the general category, it was a tough call! However, Lisa Watts’ Chocolate Salted Caramel Crunch Cake was easily the winner, being in every judges top 4 cakes! It was a delicious blend of light chocolate, a sweet but salty creamy caramel and a superb caramel brittle topping it off! It really was lovely and as you know, here at The Cakehouse we are all about flavour and whilst this also looked lovely, it easily won the taste test for us :-)

The other entries worth mentioning for taste were a lovely fruit cake (which turned the heads of even those judges who are not fruit cake fans!), a chocolate and peanut butter cake and some rather tasty cake pops.

The Savoury category followed the cakes and the breads and pies entered here were of equal standard to that of the cakes. The winner was quite possibly one of the nicest pork pies the judges had ever tasted. Baked by Bill Ward, the pastry was well cooked, light and crispy and the filling beautifully seasoned. The other entry that rated highly in this category was a lovely olive, sundried tomato and harrissa bread.

The two other categories were the professional bake, which Nato & Co Portuguese won with their tasty Portuguese Tarts and the under 16’s which was won by lovely Molly Spivey with her White chocolate, pomegranate and raspberry cake. We hope Molly keeps baking, there may be a job for her in the future with The Cakehouse!

We had another wonderful day at the Bake Off and credit must go to Wayne for organising the whole thing. Here’s to even bigger and better things next year!

We loved working with our fellow judges too and it was great to catch up with the familiar faces of Nikki (Your Last Mouthful) and Matt of Roath.net. It was also great to meet Sue Charles & Owain Wyn Evans, Dave Brookes, Dave Owens and Sharon Mills. We hope to see you again soon.

Next up for us judging wise is ‘Loaf in Roath’ on 5th May....watch this space for details; we can’t wait :-)