Sep 4

Sep 4 Find Out Who Got Baked In The Great British BakeOff. #OnlyTheBest.

Entertainment, Celebrity, Food, Lifestyle

The Great British BakeOff is one of those food shows filled with high temperature tension, doughs of amateur skills and sprinkles of winning joy. A baking show for amateur bakers to keep it short.

I have watched my Mother baked every Christmas and helped her to produce vanilla pound cakes and fruit cakes. My main responsibility was beating the eggs with a vintage hand whisk and buttering the cake tins. I later graduated into pouring the eggs into the butter mix and stirring that till it was all smooth. She made homemade biscuits, pies, pizza and bread. I didn’t like baking much because I only got the hard stuff. That changed a few years ago when I decided to make banana muffins to work, thanks to technology inventions like electric whisks and cake mixers! That wasn’t hard at all! Recently about a week ago I mentally marked a reminder to learn how to bake bread. I found it unthinkable that tea bread was now 0.80 pesewas!

So just try and imagine my immeasurable joy when I noticed there was going to be a bake off challenge during the ongoing week long MultiChoice Africa Content Showcase. Me and my food! Awesome stuff!

I found myself on Table 1 with my other Ghanaian colleagues and other journalists from Tanzania and Kenya.

I was psyched! So the challenge involved making any dessert with the given ingredients. I was like huh? This indeed is called baking on the blind.

With only 20mins to go we started working on a jam roll of sorts given the pastry base and jams we had. Taking the chef lead, I spread two jams on the surface and added chocolate. This was such a fun mess! We had split into two as another group worked on another dessert of cut-out gingerbread pastries.

This wasn’t an easy task taking into consideration having 8 other ‘chefs’ or cooks around. You know what they say about ‘too many cooks spoiling the broth?’ This was a classic example. My love for food and from reading so much of Jamie Oliver’s Instagram posts took hold and I had to share the importance of our presentation. Would it taste good? We didn’t know and left that to the royal palette of Celebrity Chef; Chef GjVaartjes.

We finally named our creation, The Mauritian Chocolate Jam Roll. The judges came by i.e Chef GjVaartjes and host IK sampled our creation.

Well at the end of the day we didn’t win. Sob! Table 6 won and then they were challenged individually to come up with creative ideas to decorate cupcakes. The final winner took away a Macbook Air! Whoop! But what do you think about our presentation?

Teamwork is so key in everything but for this challenge, way too many team members.

I absolutely love the utensils I got from BBC Lifestyle and I cant wait to get home and bake muffins, scones, meatpie, jam rolls and sausage rolls! Baking for Dayyysss! I cant wait to watch The Great South African Bake Off next month! It will be airing from Tuesday 6th October at 20:00 CAT on BBC Lifestyle. This new bake off is part of BBC Worldwide’s ongoing commitment to provide high quality local programming. I am totally waiting the day there will be The Great Ghanaian Bake Off or The Great West African Bake Off! We will bake Jollof Cake! Hehehe!!

IhHad to take a celebrity selfies with the Chef and Banky W.

You can follow all the excitement of the content showcase on social media with the hashtag #OnlyTheBest and follow @multichoice_africa on Instagram, @mcashowcase on Twitter, or via #OnlyTheBest. Lots of great fun, content and activities to catch up on!

Do you love baking? Got a food blog where you share local Ghanaian baking recipes? Do send me a link in your comments below and lets talk about food content from Africa!