Great British Jubilee Bake

Now that's what I call a cake. Edd Kimber's Great British Jubilee Bake

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine posted a photo of an incredible-looking cake on her Facebook page and threw down the gauntlet to her friends to try and bake a Jubilee-themed Victoria Sponge cake too.

It wasn’t an entirely random challenge. Vinnie works as a PR and one of her clients is Bart Spices. They’d got Great British Bake Off winner Edd Kimber to come up with a new spin on the good old Victoria Sponge using some of their spices sourced from various Commonwealth locales. That's his creation pictured above. 

There’s a competition running until 11th June inviting wannabe bakers to come up with their own Jubilee-themed cake: A baking masterclass is at stake.

By way of enticement to get involvement, I was sent the recipe and spices to have a bash at recreating Edd’s cake. To say I messed things up would understate things somewhat. Attempt number one was hastily abandoned after an accident with the spice grinder. This set me back a few days as I waited for a replacement to arrive. My next attempted bake tasted great but fell apart even before I’d tried the tricky feat of horizontally slicing each half of the cake in order to stuff them with creamy icing and blue and red berries.

Fingers crossed it’ll be third time lucky as there’s only a few more days left to submit entries and I don’t want to be a laughing stock on Facebook, where voting takes place: www.facebook.com/bartspices.

I'm dearly hoping it's anonymous.