The Great EF Academy Bake Off

The House competition table is heating up like the end of the premiership football season. We can almost see a winner in sight but its too soon to call.

Last Friday evening was one of the most hotly contested and eagerly anticipated contests of the house competition season, the Great EF Academy Bake Off.

Each House was able to have a team of four students and they had two challenges to compete in. The first was to bake a desert of their choice within the time allowed and the second was to do a technical challenge which was to make scones for a Devon Cream Tea.

Each of the Houses had 15 pound to spend on the ingredients for their bake but it was entirely their choice as to what they cooked.

The competition was to be judged by the baking club teacher Debs, her husband Garry who runs many of our sports clubs and Chris Nicholls the Head of Co-Curricular.

From the very start there was a real buzz about the place as students immediately got to work. They split into teams of two with some taking on the technical round and some taking on their own dish.

All seemed to be making good progress but as the time slipped away you could really see the pressure mounting. Some had made sponge cakes that needed to cool down before being iced while others tried recipes they had never tried before.

The technical seems easy really. How hard can it be to make a scone? Well its easy to make a scone but very hard to make the perfect scone, as anyone in Devon will tell you. It should be crusty on the outside but lovely and soft on the inside and just cool enough to cover in cream and jam.

As time ticked away the students finally heard the immortal words, 5 minutes remaining. Suddenly there was a mad panic to get cakes iced and scone cut ready to be judged.

The teams huddled around their benches as the judges made their way around tasting the fruits of their hard work.

It was clearly very hard to judge because the quality of what was baked was amazing. One piece of baking however stood out and that was an amazing sponge cake topped with icing in the shape of their house logo by Elberry House. The challenge of baking something like this and to have it iced and ready in such a short time convinced the judges that they deserved the win.

An amazing event and great fun for all involved. Not only that but it finished with cakes and scones. What could be better!