Has anyone done a "Great British Bake Off" event?

[stealthsquiggle]

The nice lady who was manning a cake stall with me at the weekend is a "proper" (3rd generation) local, and therefore gets to organise stuff...

She was suggesting we could do a village "Great British Bake Off" where people bring deserts/cakes to be judged and then eaten, and was trying to enlist my help.

Has anyone ever tried this and if so, how did you go about it? For example, do you think it would be better to have one (external, objective) judge and then let everyone eat stuff post-judging, or let everyone judge the (hopefully anonymous) entries on appearance and then on flavour, and add up the scores?

I've entered one before. Entries were anonymous then people paid £2 to come and judge on various criteria, I think taste, texture, appearance and relevance to the theme. It worked well I think, but I wasn't very involved as it was DH's work so he just took it in so I didn't see it all happening.

wem - that makes sense, for a workplace one (that was the one you won hands down with the daffodils, right?). For a village one she was thinking of attaching it to a meal - but then I was worrying that if you get 50 people then they are going to get tiny samples of each cake - is that OK, do you think?

Yes, it was the daffodils :). I won it, but don't think it was hands down - the competition was stiffer than I thought! Not sure how it would work at a sit down event. Would it be possible to have a separate table for the cakes and a bit of mingling so people got a chance to look and taste the ones they wanted? I think the scores were averaged, so not everyone voted on each cake.