Irish Car Bomb Cake and The Great British Bake-Off

"Irish Car Bomb"?? I hear you ask.

Well, lucky for you, I am here to enlighten and educate :) An Irish Car Bomb is a drink. It is made up of a shot which is half Baileys and half whiskey; Baileys on the bottom and whiskey on top. Then you pour  3/4 of a pint of Guinness and let it settle. And now for the best part! You drop the shot into the pint of Guinness and chug for your life! If you don't drink quickly enough, the drink will curdle and become pretty disgusting to drink. Mmmmm yummm! Not. What is yummy though are these cupcakes inspired by the drink from cupcake queen Annie's Eats.

Now for the second part of my story. A friend on Twitter sent me the ad for 'The Great British Bake-Off' and suggested I apply. At first, I was adamant I wouldn't. I barely like photos so I definitely don't want to be on TV. Plus I have never seen the show and was convinced there's no way I'd be good enough. However, I decided to apply thinking I'd never get through and so I had nothing to lose. So I filled in the 6-page application form, e-mailed it off and forgot about it! A few weeks later, I got a phone call and spent 45 minutes talking to a lovely lady called Cheryl about baking. And another couple of weeks after that, I got another phone call asking me to come and meet the judges with two samples of my baking; one sweet and one savoury. Now, those of you that read my blog must know that savoury baking isn't something I do often so I was a bit stumped as to what to make. Since I wanted to make things I had made before and liked; I decided to make Nigerian meat pies and Guinness cake. However, I decided to take inspiration from Annie's Eats and sandwich my Guinness cakes with her Baileys ganache and cover with her Baileys buttercream frosting. I hadn't made them before but I didn't think ganache and buttercream would be too much of a risk.

The day dawned bright and sunny and I wandered off to Holborn to meet Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry.  Under bright lights and video cameras, Paul asked me if I had ever baked bread. I said 'no' and they proceeded to try my meat pies first and labelled the dough too salty, and too tough. Mary said I used too much water and Paul said that I should practice my bread making as that would help me with dough. Then they tried the cake and had nothing but good things to say (phew!). They said it was incredibly moist, the combination of the Guinness and Baileys went very well together and was altogether "very good cake". Unfortunately they didn't put me through to the next round because they thought I'd fall at the first hurdle due to my inexperience with bread but that was fine. They didn't say anything I didn't already know; that I'm good with sweet baking and not so good with savoury! And on the plus side, I got to take my cake home and taste it!

Anyway, that's been my interesting couple of weeks. I leave you with pictures of my cake!! And I can confirm what they said, it is VERY GOOD CAKE! If you'd like to try it, use my Guinness cake recipe and Annie's Eat's ganache and butter cream recipes.