Ellie's Magical Bakery: Share your baking pics to win two places at a cupcake class with Primrose Bakery in Covent Garden, worth £90 - CLOSED

[AliceMumsnet]

Ever bake a masterpiece for your DC's birthday? Ever try but fail spectacularly? To celebrate the publication of para-olympian Ellie Simmond's new book: Ellie's Magical Bakery: A Best Cake for a Best Friend we want to see your baking successes AND disasters. We'll be rewarding our ten favourite entries with a copy of the book and one lucky winner will win two places at a cupcake class with Primrose Bakery in Covent Garden, worth £90. Find out more about the comp and the book here.

My first attempt at a Birthday cake, very proud.

That's not a disaster!

I made a Pikachu cake - that was subtitled '... Plays in a blender' by the kids. The icing kind of ran!

Oh - I didn't read the brief - this is a thread for good bakers. I'll get my coat!

I made this cake for my daughter who is horse mad, I was really pleased with the results as I had no idea when she asked for a horse cake how I was going to do it, but I refused to give in and this was the end result!

Unfortunately I have no photos of my culinary "masterpiece!" When I was in the Guides (about 40 years ago!), I decided to bake an apple crumble for my Guide cookery badge. Sadly, instead of half fat to flour, I used half flour to fat.... It kind of disintegrated before the apple all charred and burned. However, worse was yet to come..... as I closed the internal glass door of the oven in the church hall, it fell off and smashed! My Guide Captain reckoned that the examiner passed me so that she would never again have to be traumatised by the sight of my cookery!

DD's 9th birthday cake. Involved more green food colouring than you can possibly imagine.

My most recent disaster involved cookies. We had a bake-off at work, and I'd invented Sticky Toffee Pudding cookies, bases on my friend's basic cookie recipe. I'd made one batch, involving various dark sugars, dates, pecans, and fine-tuned it for the big day. The texture was a little odd, but they tasted good, so they went in for judging.

Meanwhile, in a chatroom, my friend is asking for the recipe so she can add it to her blog (she wanted to post recipes based on her book). I reeled off the recipe, and she responded with the fatal words:

"Baking powder?"

ARGH.

Cos yes, the reason I'd forgotten baking powder in the recipe was that I'd forgotten it in the cookies. Which accounted for the funny texture.

All th bake-off goods were sold for charity; I bought back half my batch of weird cookies and made my colleagues eat them.

This was DDs 10th birthday cake for a sea life themed party - it's all chocolate with edible paints & glitters

Biggest disaster was probably the cake that I made where forgot to add any butter or oil - it was rock hard & had to be dug out of the cake tin, ruined the cake tin & was inedible

& more recently I made some diary free, calcium rich flapjack type breakfast bar things - all seeds, dried fruit, molasses & coconut oil - only I was experimenting on my usual butter & honey laden flapjack recipe to accommodate DDs recently diagnosed dairy allergy - even after baking longer than usual, they came apart when lifted out of the baking tray.

Cue my ending up having to reform them into bars by hand - all dark brown, lumpy seedy gooeyness - which ended up looking just like turds

These are all DDs own work - made at 10 & 11

I was SO proud of my 8 year old son making these cupcakes. He made the cupcakes himself, then did his own PIPING!!! (I can't even do piping) and then went a bit crazy with sprinkles and decorations. He even helped his little sister decorate her cakes too.

Epic Baking Fail: Trying to bake macaroons for my daughters birthday because she loves them. Just for a moment picture those cute pretty bright pink macaroons you see on Great British Bake off. Then look how mine turned out! I wasn't too worried before they went in the oven...sure they looked a little pale but surely that pretty pink colour would brighten up in the oven, wouldn't it? And yes, they look a little flat and runny but again, they're bound to puff up when cooked, right? WRONG!

They stayed flat and pale and then wouldn't come off the baking sheet so I ended up with a pile of macaroon crumbs.

I seem to be one big baking disaster beginning to end. My Christmas panetonne tasted great and didn't even look too bad - but it did catch fire in our oven and all the baking paper around it was burnt to cinders.

I can only dream that one day I will be able to successfully bake something!

In a hurry to bake some fairy cakes for a cake competition I ended up putting the grill on instead of the oven by mistake... luckily the oven warmed up a bit first and I didnt quite put the fairy cakes on the top shelf, so they cooked a bit before I noticed the burning smell as they started to singe! I just cut the burnt tops off and added extra icing! Dont think they won any prizes but they looked passable hidden under the icing mountain!

seriously, these are your disasters? This was my attempt at a chocolate cake for my daughter's 1st birthday. It goes without saying there was a wild panic and scrambling for a less 'runny' recipe the second time around...

This is my husband's first attempt at using fondant icing. Didn't turn out too badly.

DD still refers to her second birthday as her "sheep birthday" due to the cake I made. I was quite pleased with it as I like baking but decoration is not my strong point.

In contrast, we made some out of a box Hello Kitty biscuits. You can see the picture on the box and our attempt look a bit different.

I was really pleased with how this turned out, but I never imagined that it would be shared by m&s on Facebook (because of them selling Percy pigs, randomly picked my cake!) And it got over 6000 likes and 300 shares! It was over 6 months ago now and my jaw is still on the floor!!!

This is my favourite cake I have ever made, I am only new to the world of decorating cakes

do we need to add a photo for this.
if not becasue it wont let me.it would be the cupcake tower i did for my mums 40th.the stand was made out of baked bean cans!!and plates wrapped with foil.cupcakles all the way to the cieling then scarily placed on top a larger cake.amazing pride.

This competition has now closed. Thank you for all your wonderful entries, the photos look splendid and the baking disasters made us laugh.

Congratulations to the following runners-up, you've won a copy of Ellie's Magical Bakery:

RockinHippy
Kif
Badgerwife
Bakingbun
Julker
Don’tCallMeBaby
HappyMum4
Sharond101
Hopezibah
Lent1l

And the winner of the two places at a cupcake class with Primrose Bakery in Covent Garden is ... Sabretiggr. Congratulations!

Will PM all winners soon

Happy baking one and all x

Have the books been sent out yet as there is no sign of mine. thanks.