You’ve heard of The Great British Bake Off, well now you can participate in The Big Birmingham Bake.
Digbeth manages to once again bring the fun to Birmingham. Based on Floodgate Street next door to The Floodgate . The Big Birmingham Bake is here on a three year lease and is ready to provide endless baking fun for friends, family, lovers, hen parties, social gatherings, even a corporate get together.
12 cooking stations filled with teams of 2, one very large, modern (and not cold) marquee and 90 minutes to get your bake on. All before Head Baker (Emma in our case) gets to cut into, examine, taste and critique your bake in comparison to all the other teams to see who is going to be crowned the WINNER! 2nd and 3rd places are announced too.
We absolutely LOVED it. Our month was doughnut month. A perfect month for us as we love doughnuts and have tasted a fair amount of them. Sadly we have never baked any, so it was going to be an interesting first time for us. Trying to get the flavours and designs that we wanted with the ingredients available and our average (mostly novice) baking abilities making them.
We arrived early and had chance to take some photos of the waiting area and bar.
We ordered ourselves some reasonably priced drinks – a tea and a soft drink and sat down on the comfy settees to wait for the session to start.
There is a free water station in the seating area, and lots of greenery making it feel very homely. I say this as we seem to have a plant in every room of our house at the moment. The seating area also is fitted with heaters to keep you toasty warm on those cold days – like this weekend.
At 2:30pm we were called inside the marquee and found a cooking station to work at.
Filling a cupboard underneath our station, with our coats and personal belongings, we then put on the provided black aprons and made ourselves familiar with the station and ingredients – all ingredients and cooking tools are provided by The Big Bake. All you need to bring is yourselves.
The Bake was great. Easy to follow instructions. Ingredients pre measured out and we absolutely loved being creative using ingredients from the creative corner to make our doughnuts stand out.
There were loads of flavourings and ingredients to choose from. We decided we were going to make Banana and Butterscotch doughnuts with a lotus biscoff topping.
It was fun creating the doughnuts from scratch. Mixing the dough mix and pouring it into the baking moulds /trays.
Watching it in the oven and making sure to take out the doughnuts at the right time. Our rings were finished a lot sooner that our doughnut balls.
And then came the fun of making the filling for the ball doughnuts and then putting the icing onto them.
After we had finished them, we had to place them on a silver tray, a cake turntable and take it to the front of the room, ready to be judged.
This section was great fun. Seeing and hearing about other people’s creations, domestic fall outs and differences of opinions. Emma (Head Baker) cut open the doughnuts, critiqued them and gave them a try. Before sending us all away (back to our stations) for a couple of minutes so she could deliberate (with herself) on the winning doughnuts.
We came… 2nd!
I have to admit, 2nd for us was as good as a win. We couldn’t believe it and were so chuffed. Apparently we created “the perfect bake” and I reckon if we had just put in some more filling, we would have won.
If you would like to find out more and possibly join in the fun, book on at https://www.thebigbirminghambake.com You will not be disappointed.
Don’t forget to get your merchandise before you leave too. We got ourselves a wooden spoon.
Disclaimer : we were invited along on a gifted basis to see what we thought of the session. We were under no obligation to share any posts or reviews. We just really liked it and wanted to share it with you.