The Great British Bake Off eat your heart out! It’s that time again where MEC welcomes back ‘The Great MEC Bake Off’. Around this time of year we hold a fantastic event, where the majority of our bakers here at MEC Manchester and many of our media owners battle it out for an afternoon by baking various types of cakes for our two fantastic charities that we are supporting this year – Manchester Children’s Oncology Ward and Katie’s Ski tracks.
The Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital provides specialist healthcare services for children and young people throughout the north west, as well as nationally and internationally. The hospital sees 135,000 patient visits each year across a range of specialties including oncology, haematology, bone marrow transplant, burns, genetics and orthopaedics.
Katie’s Ski Tracks are a registered UK charity that takes disadvantaged children with life-threatening or life-limiting medical conditions, disability, or extreme social problems, on an adventure skiing holiday of a lifetime to Italy - without their parents or carers. Because of their conditions these youngsters are so often excluded from school and family holidays and for some, unfortunately, it will be the first and last holiday they ever take.
There were seven different categories for people to enter their cakes into ranging from fancy glittered fairy cakes to gingerbread caramel houses and amazing show off cakes. There was even a courgette cake in there! As there were so many cakes to choose from we decided to have three fantastic people from our amazing two charities to be the judges. This requires eating OBSCENE amounts of cake, which surprisingly they were quite welcoming too! They sampled over 30 cakes and finally came to a decision on winners for each of the categories. They then also then had to choose an overall winner, which they thought deserved it the most out of everybody for taste, texture and originality. Congratulations John Morton, your vanilla swirly ice cream cones were a hit!
So healthy diets were put to one side for the afternoon, while everybody sampled slices and in some cases, handfuls of other peoples cakes. However, as much as those in attendance may have enjoyed this event on the day, I’m sure that behind the scenes while baking the cakes, there were cut thumbs, grated fingers and even salt used instead of sugar in some cases. Disaster!
All that aside, we raised a fantastic £280 for our two charities, pushing our total right up there towards our £5,000 goal! Keep going MEC, we’re almost there!