Bloggers Bake Off – Glasgow Cookery School

A few weeks ago I was invited to attend a Bloggers bake off at The Cookery School, hosted by Kenwood and Currys.

I was excited to take part! Upon arrival, I was led into a room filled with the other bloggers, and I quickly felt at ease. After nattering with some of the others, I teamed up with the lovely Jamie and Amy, and off we went into the kitchen to be shown the ropes by our chef for the day, Danny.

First up, Scones. The staff had, thankfully, set out all the ingredients in exact measures. As an amateur baker who once made muffins on a flat oven tray (they collapsed to one side), this made me breathe a huge sigh of relief. The scones were fairly easy to make, and Jamie, Amy and I got stuck in. After beating the mixture by hand, with aching guns I slowly realised that the Kenwood mixer at each of our stations was there for a reason. Silly Rene. It was time for the scones to go in the oven…

A tip: don’t add too much milk to the mixture too quickly. It’s good for the mixture to be a little wet but you need to be able to roll it out and cut into shapes. We had to cover our mixture with quite a bit of flour before being able to roll and cut!

As the Scones baked, and filled the room with a heavenly scent, all the bloggers had tea and nattered some more. 20 mins later, the ovens pinged and we all returned to the kitchen to see how our scones had turned out..

Not bad for a first attempt if you ask me!

So next up, Victoria Sponge. Danny showed us what to do once more, and sent us on our way. I must say, Danny was absolutely fantastic at explaining the process and detailing every step, very clear and concise. And once again we had the ingredients measured out for us (phew).

After whirring up our sponge ingredients and pouring into the cake tin, we were quite concerned that our mixture looked pretty thin, but after a quick nosy in other peoples tins, we were reassured that ours was fine.

We moved straight onto the cupcakes, which were again surprisingly easy to make. The reason everything seemed so simple was 100% down to the Kenwood mixer. Not having to hand-mix things was a life saver! Our arms all limped in relief once more. It was time to put the sponge and cupcakes into the oven, and as they baked, us bloggers were treated to some leek and potato soup, which was nice but not as good as our leekoto soup… just saying

Soon there were yet more delicious aromas filling the air, and we returned to check on our baked goodies. It was also time to decorate them, yipeee! We filled the sponge with cream, and jam, and topped with some icing sugar.

We then decorated the cupcakes which was SO much fun! My fellow baker Amy suggested adding pink and green food colouring to the cream and adding it along with plain white cream to an icing bag. This resulted in the cutest swirly toppings! We decorated the rest of the cupcakes with tiny ice cream cones and chocolate buttons. They looked adorable, and tasted delish if I do say so myself!

Last, but not least, we were shown how to make chocolate chip muffins. Once again, the Kenwood mixer made this an absolute breeze. They were so easy to make. We of course used ALL of the chocolate buttons on offer. A short while later, our muffins were ready:

Now that our day of baking was complete, we put all of our baked goodies together for the obligatory photo shoot:

It was such a wonderful day and I learned a lot. After a lovely send off from the hosts, we were presented with some amazing goodies, most notably a Kenwood hand mixer, so we could try and recreate our baking at home.

I made scones the following weekend and despite a tiny mishap using the hand mixer (I pressed the on button whilst there was mixture on the whisks… cue cleaning mixture off the ceiling for ten minutes), it really did make all of the difference and I can’t wait to embark on more baking adventures!