NOW CLOSED Talk to Stork about your favourite things to bake, and discuss 'Bake Brave' for World Baking Day 2013. £100 Baking hamper to be won

[KatieBMumsnet]

World Baking Day is on Sunday 19th of May and to coincide with this Stork would love to hear what you think of this year's theme "Bake Brave".

Stork say: "World Baking Day is a global event sponsored by Stork and the theme for 2013 is to 'Bake Brave'. From novice to master baker, food blogger to food celebrity, World Baking Day has been introduced to inspire people to step out of their baking comfort zone and master a cake they've never baked before."

For this year's theme, 100 recipes of varying difficulty have been developed and can be found here

Please take a look at the recipes and come back to this thread to let us know what you think. Which recipe would you try to 'Bake Brave' with? Are there any that you've already mastered?

Please also share your favourite treats to bake as well as any top baking tips you may have for other MNers or for getting kids into baking.

Everyone who shares their thoughts on this thread will be entered into a prize draw, where one MNer will win a £100 Baking hamper filled with sweet treats and baking goodies.

Thanks and good luck,

MNHQ

Fabulous idea, and DH will be very pleased it lands on his birthday my waistline will not

Recipe's look really nice, think I'll try the courgette and feta muffin ones (so I feel vaguely healthy about what I give DD!).

Cooking with children - DD is 2 yo. I've been baking biscuits with her for ages. My top tip is to quickly rustle up a shortbread dough and then get her to help with rolling out/shaping. If ever she helps making the dough it all goes wrong - she sticks her fingers in the scales when I'm weighing, she tries stirring it and the flour goes everywhere etc. If I can get the dough together super quick she helps with her favourite bit (the rolling and cutting) and it's much less stressful until the clearing away . I like a shortbread type recipe as it doesn't use raw eggs and I'm a bit obsessive with worrying about DD eating raw eggs and she's always eating the raw dough!

I love the site. I bake a bit, for school fetes, special occasions etc. I am going to try the lemon and almond loaves, as I have to bake for both a sports day and a summer fete soon and have been looking for a recipe for my mini loaf tin.

The DC like mainly licking the owl, but DD (6) likes the electric whisk A LOT, and she also likes cracking eggs. She is Chief Egg Cracker, and gets v upset if I forget.

Licking the bowl. We don't have an owl.

Miranda's Chocolate Brownie Meringue Cake

Taffeta

I love to make almond cookies as everyone loves them in this household.

I'm not a brilliant baker although I've always enjoyed making simple sponge cakes and cookies. I've always used Stork because there's no point is spending a fortune on butter which is too hard to bake with so has to be softened. Stork is very convenient. I made the lemon cupcakes from the website today because they were very easy. However they were a little dry so I might try adding more lemon juice or even some lemon curd and see how that works next time.

Excellent excuse for baking at the weekend!
Love asking with my children, who in turn mostly love licking the bowl!

I'll be trying he ricotta cheesecake and make the beetroot cake. Yum!

I bake a fair amount but don't get really excited about it, but my dc all bake regularly and they are getting quite adventurous.

I'd go for ricotta cheesecake or poppy and honey cake, but the dc would go for ceci n'est pas un gateau, for the name, they've been baking French cakes for a project lately. They'd choose something like cream cheese brownies too.

My dc have a book, the Dodo recipe book, where you paste in favourite recipes. They love this. It did have categories "meat", "fish", "Puddings" etc, but they don't eat meat or fish so they changed these first two labels to "icing" and "sweets" So they have a whole category just for icing.

So many I would love to try including the chocolate dragon. I think the most that I have mastered is chocolate chip cookies. We love to bake and my top tip for baking with really little children is to keep it simple relax and expect mess, leave yourself plenty of time and enjoy it!

There are some lovely looking recipes on there, but I'm really not one for fancy baking without a very good reason! I like nice simple things that taste amazing without many ingredients or complicated techniques. My favourites are shortbread, 4:4:2 fairy cakes, tea loaf and lemon drizzle cake.

DS1 has a recipe book with really clear, life-size pictures of every step which he really likes. We do fairy cakes and scones from that and they work every time. He likes to read the recipe and talk about other things we could make too. DS2 isn't so much into baking because he doesn't like getting his hands mucky. Hopefully will come with time!

i love baking bread & cakes and always like to make sure i have a fresh cake in the house. To "bake brave" it would have to be biscuits as they always turn out disasterous :(.
I always use a reuseable liner on all my cake tins, such a lifesaver, it stops anything sticking and can be used again & again.
The website is great, i love the idea that you can test yourself by doing a more difficult recipe each time.

I'm impressed with the website. Lovely responsive design with fab photography (my work involves this kind of thing and I'm hard to impress).

I love to bake, my current favourite is a chocolate brownie cake. Even easier than making a tray and a nice thin slice is very gooey, moreish and can be dressed up with a scoop of ice cream and scattered fruit for dessert.

I'll explore the baking site at a more reasonable hour and definitely pick one to try.

Ooooh I always use Stork for my baking -think it's because my Nanna did too and she baked the most amazing cakes for our birthdays. My easiest and definitely the cake I get most "my goodness that's gorgeous" comments on is my blueberry cake. Starting to encourage my boys to bake more with me, but find I have more success if I get everything ready in advance.

Love the sound of World Bake Day and recipes look great.

Just come back to this after posting earlier in the week to choose a recipe and get the ingredients bought, but I have to say I REALLY don't like the website at all. The photos are nice but I hate the way that they are all crowded onto one page with no space between them, in order to find the name you hover and lose the picture and get an ugly coloured box, The photos drifting about as you move the mouse makes me feel giddy. I would also rather the second level of pictures weren't all in one great long scrolling page but each link on the front page just went straight to the recipe page. The little messages are a bit twee too.

The honey banana cakes look really nice and I might well have a go! Most of the things on my level looked scrumptious.

DS is 3 and loves baking with me and his grandma. His favourite bake is gingerbread men with Smartie buttons but he also likes making fairy cakes, biscuits and birthday cake. My general rule for baking with him is to relax and not worry about the perfection of the end result. We have had lots of gingerbread men with no buttons :o

I enjoy making banana loaf cake. Well I say I enjoy it's just what I make most often. Dh has a habit of buying too many bananas on a Sunday m come the following weekend they are past it he doesn't want them do banana loaf is suggested. If he likes it he should just say! I'd make it if he wanted it my tip is a damp tea towel around the cake tin in the oven n you get even risen cakes

So I have just made Miranda's Chocolate brownie meringue cake, I bake loads so it was fairly easy, and it looks scrumptious! Taking it to work tomorrow so we shall see how it tastes

I find the best way to enable children to learn to cook is to accept that they are going to make a mess . Mine have always been in the kitchen with me whilst I baked, from helping to stir when they were toddlers to weighing ingredients.
These things take practice, so letting them loose with age appropriate tasks will be messy but is the best way to learn.

We bake every sunday for the week ahead, a big cake that wont last the day, some small traybakes like flapjack or rock buns for pack lunches, and some biscuits for snacks.

Oh I love baking. My gran was an amazing baker, always had tons full of delights. Some of my happiest childhood memories come from the afternoons spent in her kitchen with our 'pinnys' on, baking away. Gingerbread, truffles, tea loaf, butterfly buns, fruit scones, shortbread and dairy cakes. Learning the method, creaming sifting, folding, causing, rolling and measuring carefully.

She died before my wedding, being the youngest I was the only one she didn't get to do a wedding cake for, yet I was the one that baked with her.

I have her tins now. Old tins that I keep full. I have her baking tins too that I use for my gingerbread and fairy cakes, her flan dish and jeely pans. She's the voice in my head when I bake. 'Hair back, pinny on, hands washed' she says to me. She's the reason I fill the sink with hot soapy water ('Wash as you go') before I start and why I crack my eggs into a mug before adding them to the mix (in case there's a bad one she said, I've never had a bad one yet!).

My brave bake would be the wedding cake she never got to do for me.

I'm a fairly confident baker. My husband loves banana cake so that's what I make most. I'm learning to make my own bread at the moment, after several disasters I think I've found a recipe that's just right.

I really want to try the Greek salad cake on the Stork website, it looks a bit different and really tasty!

Would love to master the Chocolate Birthday Cupcakes 18/100. Daughters 8th birthday soon they would be perfect! We do bake together quite often, son doing cookery at school for the first time at moment and he loves it! My baking tip would be always use right sized tin for cakes and just enjoy :)

Lovely recipes. I might try the banana and honey one.

My favourite cake is a cherry and almond loaf.
I weigh the eggs and use the same amount of butter/stork.
I use 25% less weight of sr flour and sugar and add ground almonds and grated marzipan (plus cherries)
My top tip for baking is to have everything at room temperature, not straight from the fridge

had a like at the site but on my mobile so it didn't work so well. did see a chocolate Brownie meringue cake, but am not sure how difficult it is, will look on PC later.

I bake loads at home, I like adapting recipes that I'm familiar with. I tend not to attempt anything complex at the moment as the youngest demands attention and the food suffers (he's only one, will be going back to interesting recipes when I can! )

I do a lot of bread and cake baking and try to get the kids involved. they like kneading and licking out the bowl best

last night my 10 yo son made chocolate and pecan tart on a sweet pastry

for today he made hot chocolatse souffle

its fecking ace. He can also make lemon tarte, bakewell tart, choux pastry, sausage rolls

amazing