At work we are particularly good at a sweepstake.  Usually this involves picking a team out of a hat and waiting patiently for an inordinate amount of time until you either win or lose.  Not here.  Here we spend an inordinate amount of time making up extra rules and finding a way of making food enter the equation.

So here I am; baking for our work Bake-Off sweepstake because my baker (Andrew) lost in the final.

I never planned to blog about this, but as it seems that the bar has been raised yet again, I felt I had no choice to match that approach and provide a bit of a running commentary, some photos and a video to accompany my bake.

Receipe

First of all, you need all of these are the ingredients.  Pretty straight forward I think:

Secondly, you need to remove the cat from the equation otherwise he’ll just end up licking everything – and that’s never a good taste.  I usually find it’s best to feed the little bugger which makes him stop hassling me and allows me to lock him out of the kitchen:

Thirdly; do all of this:

What you end up with is a Chocolate Orange Halloween Pavlova Crown, based on the final theme of ‘Royal’ -complete with chocolate cobwebs, chocolate bats and caramel shards:

Enjoy, and don’t forget to vote high!