Cakes for a cause – Rounding up our 2024 Spark Bake Off

It’s been another smashing year in our annual Spark Bake Off contest. An incredible ten bakers have been fighting it out in recent months to impress our agency critics and battle their way to the grand final. The regular face-offs have been a great excuse to catch up with colleagues over a cake – and to support Macmillan’s famous coffee morning drive. Throughout the event, we’ve raised enough donations to fund a Macmillan Grant to help a family affected by cancer, and to run Macmillan’s online community for over three hours.

We had a really varied field to judge this year, running themed weeks in a similar vein to the Great British Bake Off TV show. This led to us tasting Dom’s traditional Japanese Melonpan during bread week – and Isla marking ‘freestyle week’ with a cake imaginatively decorated like a swimming pool. Tom’s sausage roll surprise (with a beef filling, guarded by a herd of plastic cows) received mixed reviews from the panel on savoury week – as well as the dreaded wooden spoon.

We had some cinnamon and chocolate morning buns worthy of a high-end bakery from Oli Brown, but he fell just short of the Grand Final. Issy made it to the showpiece event with her dark chocolate and raspberry cheesecake, while Chris swooped in with some lemon meringue cookies. Chris’ cookie brownies fired him to victory in the final, scoring just fractionally higher than Issy’s festive savoury scones. They both received some baking prizes for their efforts – a job well done!

This year’s contest really showed the creativity of our team – and I certainly came away with some new recipe ideas to try out! That’s all for another year, but I’m sure the Spark Bake Off will return once again in 2025.