For David’s birthday this year, my mom and I participated in the Great Birthday Bake Off. We were a little late coming to the Great British Bake Off obsession but now we’re in the thick of it. Mom and I each received an email with the following instructions:

“The birthday judge would like you to create any type of chocolate cake, but it must be at least 8″ tall, and must incorporate a squirrel.  You have 18 hours.

Get ready, get set… BAKE!”

We set to work!

In keeping with the theme, I made a Mary Berry recipe for chocolate cake. I had a heck of a time doing the conversions from metric as I went but I managed. I recently acquired a kitchen scale and felt very GBBO-authentic pouring my fancy flour etc. into a container on the scale.

The cake turned out delicious and extremely rich. Even a sliver wound up being quite an undertaking.

In classic GBBO showstopper style, I decided to showcase as many “skills” as possible and make the whole thing as absurdly overwrought as I could. It’s also nice to go a little overboard for birthday festivity reasons. So, on the first night I made the cake as well as some cookies for decoration. I used the Smitten Kitchen (praise Deb) maple nutmeg cookie recipe which may be my new fall favorite. It made a bazillion cookies and I was happy to have plenty leftover. I found a squirrel shaped cookie cutter at world market but also had my heart set on acorn-shaped cookies so I bought a mason-jar shaped cookie cutter (wtf?) as well and used pliers, wire-cutters and duct-tape to shape it into an acorn:

One of my co-workers saw the idea for acorn-shaped caramels dipped in chocolate to make the little caps so I also attempted some homemade caramels using this recipe. They didn’t quite set (maybe not so fool-proof) but I was able to roll a few into a semblance of an acorn and dip the tops into my tempered chocolate. You can see them peeking out of the tree stump in the final product.

On day two of my bake-offing, I frosted the cake using the ganache in Mary’s recipe, made some simple chocolate cupcakes to use as structure for the tree, and tried my hand at tempering chocolate to make both the bark of the tree (chocolate spread on wax paper in strips and then chilled) and some chocolate leaves for added decoration (using a mold borrowed from a co-worker). I rounded out the over-doing by whipping up three different buttercreams to decorate some autumny-forresty-bushes: Elderflower buttercream tinted yellow, rose buttercream tinted red, and an earl grey buttercream tinted orange. Here’s the finished product:

Mom’s showstopper was a super yummy Smitten Kitchen chocolate cake (I’m not sure which one) with jam between the layers. She made and colored her own fondant to shape an albino squirrel and make the cake itself look like oscilloscope that Mr. Squirrel was working on fixing up. As I was assembling my cupcake tower inside the tree (to meet the height requirement), she ran downstairs with some cupcakes saying “I just have to go do a thing I definitely was already planning on doing before I saw this.” Her cake was delicious and clearly a showstopper indeed:

The judging was thorough and filled with direct Paul Hollywood quotes and mannerisms. Our family friend Cristina asked David which was most important: Style, or Taste. David replied: “Cristina, this is bake-off. Both have to be perfect.”

At the end of the day, I brought home the grand prize and I couldn’t be more thankful to my friends and family for helping me to get here. I’m absolutely chuffed. What a wonderful process!